Blame the Customer
You probably get the customers you deserve. I learned that a major American bank wants its customers to be its testers. And it fines them if they miss a defect. A friend of mine—call him Van—fired that bank recently. Van admits he doesn’t scour bank statements. He scans for obvious problems, like a balance thousands of dollars off from what he expects. If he finds none, he moves on with his life. Not long ago, he noticed something called an “Advantage Fee.” It was small, but Van did some research. He learned that he’d been charged the fee for a long time, but that his account type and history should have exempted him. “The bank customer service agent was great,” he told me. “She said it looked like I’d gotten the fee stopped before, but somehow it got turned back on about a year ago.” The agent stopped the fee, credited his account for six