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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

> I know I've been treated differently by bankers [...] based on my dress.

This is very true. At one point I managed a bit of money in a Wells Fargo PMA. It was fun to dress and groom similarly to The Dude, wander into branches like I was lost, and get treated like crap until they looked at the screen. Invariably they quickly summoned a manager to whisk me away to an office and asked if I wanted coffee, and their demeanor immediately changed. It became a personal hobby of mine for a while because they very obviously treat the "normals" differently than Premier accountholders. (Doesn't work at my new bank, sadly.)

I'm sure a number of folks here retain balances that far exceed my own at the time. Try this sometime. It's a fun psychological demonstration.

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Anecdotally I know somebody in Seattle who absolutely freaked out a bank branch manager by moving their entire account after being treated poorly... You never know who fits in the venn diagram of:

a) likes to work on their own cars on the weekend

b) goes to the bank in oil spotted work clothes

c) has family that purchased a large chunk of microsoft stock in 1987

That sounds like fun, but I can't think of any reason why I would ever need to visit a bank, or keep more than a trivial amount of money in a bank with physical branches, when their interest rates are so low.

What are the tangible benefits of a non-Internet bank these days?

It's not psychological, it's just business. There's a relationship between wealth and how you dress, and banks couldn't give a shit about poor people.

> There's a relationship between wealth and how you dress

There most certainly is not, full stop, and this is the psychological aspect to which I am referring and colorfully exploiting in my anecdote. Someone who hangs out on Hacker News should realize this, since our profession in particular has minted a large number of people who are exorbitantly wealthy and still wear Old Navy flip flops and hoodies. Poor people also inherit Prada, and quite a few hucksters within multiple industries dress in a particular way to exploit this psychological conditioning while having no money at all.

This is the entire point of my comment, and assuming that relationship exists says more about your subscription to certain expectations and conditioning about people than your remarks on "business." It's actually a disservice to yourself to assume there is a relationship between wealth and style based on customs that are increasingly becoming dated.

There most certainly is. You've pointed out some exceptions but do you really think that on the whole they're not correlated? Having more money means people can afford to dress better and are more likely to travel in circles in which dressing well is important.

This may be a bad thing, but it's a reality that people are attuned to - it's a useful heuristic even though it's imperfect. Should you treat people badly because of it? No, but you shouldn't treat them badly even if you were 100% sure they weren't wealthy. That's a separate problem.

Okay, but ask yourself if that's an actual correlation or an imagined one based on customs and psychological factors. (Which is my point.)

The assertion was that "there is a relationship," without any sort of qualification. I'm saying that relationship only exists because of the belief itself and if we all stopped believing it tomorrow, there would be no relationship any longer. So it's not really a correlation at all and only an imaginary one that has largely built itself up on conditioning, upbringing, and so on.

I'm not saying you're wrong nor denying a tenuous correlation, I'm saying it's faulty to assume a correlation where one only exists due to external factors, and that leads to the problems that both you and I point out with the correlation.

> if we all stopped believing it tomorrow

Similarly, money provides no power in society to the person controlling it. Because if we all stopped believing that it would continue to work in the future, it wouldn't.

... This is an obviously incorrect argument! There are things that occur only because of widespread belief. Nevertheless, those things do occur!

> There most certainly is not, full stop

This is an extremely bold claim. You are claiming that within less than a generation, people stopped dressing as a way to send social signals. I think you are so off base you must live in a tech bubble.

> It's actually a disservice to yourself to assume there is a relationship between wealth and style based on customs that are increasingly becoming dated.

Curious why you think car sales folks are irrational. Do you really think the guy who targets the "likely to buy" customers based on appearance does worse than the guy who takes all comers?

I have a bridge to sell you if you don't think profiling like this works. Sure you miss the outliers, but the mainstream makes up for it.

Is it becoming dated? Perhaps if you're looking for a 3 piece suit. But there are still all sorts of "wealth" signals the vast majority of people probably don't even know they are giving off in the way they dress.

> there are still all sorts of "wealth" signals the vast majority of people probably don't even know they are giving off in the way they dress.

Yup. The shoes, belt, watch, haircut, demeanor, the way you talk, walk, all give off signals to the astute salesman.

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