I rarely go into banks and I've never knowingly met a bank manager either socially or professionally. And I see no reason to break the habit of a lifetime. In fact as I think about it I've never withdrawn money from a hole in the wall using a credit card either.
I'd heard that this town centre place has a coin counting machine so if you've accumulated a lot of coins you push a few buttons chuck in all your coins and it counts impressively quickly and gives you a print out credit note.
Then you need to have an account or a relative with same. For me it's the latter as they must lodge the money on the credit note and withdraw it to avoid money laundering legislation.
Well that's the theory. It didn't quite work out that way as the machine was already full of coins so it only counted a small part of what I'd accumulated at home and on screen it froze and said go get an assistant.
The assistant didn't keep me waiting any time at all but it became tedious with her repeatedly pushing on screen buttons, opening and closing the machine and restarting the machine only for it to count very few coins and stop again.
So after 10 minutes of this unsatisfactory process we each became fed up. When told the machine was full and they had to wait for Securicor to arrive to empty and re set which mightn't be today I said I'd try again next week. That'll have me in a bank twice in a week or about the number of times I've been in a bank in the last 10 or more years.
I'd say the machine counted the coins that it did count in well under a minute but had I to sort and count it would have taken me many hours.
The staff are all mega helpful and a cheery bunch.
Oh and a word about our stupid politicians who devise stupid legislation that even if you only get five pounds via coin lodgement it still must be lodged into an account to be paid out meanwhile real criminals can money launder tens of millions of pounds undetected. I mean about two years ago here one of the biggest money laundering scams - a dodgy exchange bureau- that had gone on for years was right next door to a police station. Ya couldn't make it up. read more