The only cash machines that charge over here that I've seen are rented ones at packed events (clubs, concerts etc).
It is certainly possible to pay for those services, but it's not normal. Some people let it happen out of laziness, or due to not being aware that they can do better.
We do have a fees problem, but it's mostly with other services. For example, many banks will charge some outrageous amount (like $5, outrageous compared their cost) to give you an electronic copy of a past bank statement. High overdraft fees are common. If you accidentally use your debit card to make a purchase that exceeds what you have in your account, the bank will often charge you a ~$35 fee rather than reject the transaction. This is optional, but they push it hard and sell it as a "service," since it means you're never left unable to complete your transaction. Never mind that being out a bunch of money is bad too.
Even worse, some banks (at least for a while) would intentionally maximize your overdraft fees by sorting your transactions on any give day from largest to smallest before applying them. For example, imagine if you have $99 in your account, and you use your debit card to make purchases, in order, of $1, $1, $1, and $100. The last transaction should overdraw the account, hit you with a $35 fee, and your balance will be -$39, right? Wrong! They'll run the $100 transaction first, overdrawing the account, and then run the $1 transactions on the overdrawn account. Net result: four $35 fees and a balance of -$144.
So yes, many of our banks suck, especially larger ones, but it's not quite as bad as everyone paying to withdraw and deposit.
Of course, the CFPB is looking pretty dead at this point, so who knows what they'll do after Trump dismantles it.
FREE CASH
Of course that unfortunately only means that you're not charged for the withdrawel, but the cash doesn't really come free.
Using a cash machine is free, for the majority of cases — those in banks, supermarkets, shopping centres, railway stations and so on are run by one of the banks and are free for customers of all banks to use. It doesn't matter if the machine or customer is with/is a major bank or a small one, they're all on the same network and charge the same: £0.
The exception is captive markets. Cash machines within a stadium, nightclub or a convenience store often charge. I've never used one of these, it's so easy to avoid doing so.
Free would be nice but I can understand why banks would charge non-customers fees. If your ATM is in a very high traffic and convenient place, you are going to be servicing and refilling the machine more often which costs more money. If you can control the usage a bit by charging non-customers a fee then you can reduce service costs.
I assume this averages out amongst the large banks, who probably each have their fair share of convenient places. The small banks pay for their customers' convenience; presumably a very worthwhile cost for some of the new banks or Internet-only banks.
But withdrawing and depositing money is a service that costs the banks money to do doesn't it? I'm can see why you don't like but I can't see it as morally 'disgusting'.
Would you look after someone else's meagre current account for them, and give it back on demand, for free? I wouldn't.
I don't really know who covers that cost in the UK. It's certainly not interest they earn lending out our savings is it? Especially this type of customer since they have no savings because the point of the card is to encourage them to do so, and since interest rates are so low.
Who is paying to cover the costs of a basic bank account of someone who doesn't save? I've no idea.
Have we forgotten what a bank is for? It's to conveniently and safely store money. Part of that convenience is to withdraw and store money at many locations. If a bank didn't offer that they wouldn't get my money.
What capital? The people referred to in this article don't have any savings. Many working class people have no savings at all, and only a few thousand in their current accounts.
Criticising this offer is as valid as criticising any other expensive and bad service.
I suppse where bank accounts are free including services like ATM that might be an indication that banks compete for all customers - which might ni turn be an indication that all customers are reasonably likely to buy financial products such as taking loans or savings products in the future.
Even now, most free checking accounts only require a certain amount of money, transactions they collect fees on, etc.
With interest rates so low, they don't make much just holding onto 500 dollars for someone.
Savings accounts had less fees, but you couldn't use them to write checks out of, etc.
It's literally their job. It's their function. Why am I reimbursing them? I'm giving them my money essentially to invest, why am I also paying them to support basic business functions on my money, with my money, while they make money using my money?
It's easy to say "hurr durr why are you paying them for a service they provide, who does that??" but that's missing the point. Banks are a special case.
> I can't see it as morally 'disgusting'.
It disproportionately affects the poor, and for no real reason than 'I can charge this so I will'. Apparently some places charge you to even check your balance? What the hell.
> I don't really know who covers that cost in the UK
The big, fat, rich banks do. Because the total cost of running all their ATM's is a fraction of a rounding error on their yearly turnover.
But what about those people who aren't giving the bank any meaningful capital to invest? What is the bank getting in return in that case?
Or are you arguing that banks should be forced to provide it as a kind of social service even if they don't earn anything? I can understand that kind of point of view.
The people not giving the bank any meaningful capital are going to cost them much/anything,because it's not as if Joe Bloggs with $500 in his account is going to be doing a thousand withdrawals and balance checks a month.
The point is the banking fees hit those who can least afford to pay them the most. It doesn't have to be like that, and I can understand a kind of point of view that supports it.
Or are you arguing that banks should be forced to provide it as a kind of social service even if they don't earn anything?
For another laugh buy a house or car with a loan and there's zillions of little fees and commissions tacked on to the base price. Complexity only increases over time, and it only decreases with collapse.
This is part of the logic of the old great depression "liquidate liquidate liquidate" guy who sounds heartless in retrospect but in practice the only way to reallocate poorly allocated resources in the modern capitalist system is to flush and start over, so not knowing the GD was going to be as bad as it turned out, the guy was correct, the faster the obsolete stuff gets flushed, the faster we get back to real living. Which is analogous to current conditions, and why many people are unhappy nothing has been fixed in the banking system (or another example is health care, obamacare and trumpcare have in common that they fix none of the core problems, which is our health care allocation system is an expensive disaster)
And it's not like they are about to go out of business either.
It's also clear that banks aren't losing money. What's at issue is how they earn their money and at whose expense.
It sets a floor for the spread, not a ceiling. All else being equal, the bank should make more money when the amount of interest it has to pay its customers drops.
It also ties in to how banks are regulated. Now again, I'm not super well versed in the history here, but as I understand it, after the stock market crash in the 20's, congress passed the Glass-Steagall act which, among other things, said that the banks either had to be an investment bank, or a commercial bank, but not both. That way the commercial banks, which are holding regular folks money, can't gamble it all away. That seemed to work pretty well, so much so that congress was later convinced to repeal large portions of Glass-Steagall.
Once that happened, investment bank culture, which never really left commercial banks, once again came to prominence, along with it's emphasis on making money for shareholders.
The reason I mention all that is to say that during Glass-Steagall commercial banks had to go back to making money slowly but surely through giving out safe loans and charging modest fees for basic services. In the meantime, their shareholders, having had a taste of the large dividends generated by investment fees and the like, came to expect more than the safe, modest returns commercial banks used to provide. In order to appease investors, commercial banks then had to look for other ways of generating profits. That's where things like atm fees, excessive overdraft charges, monthly checking account fees, and the like come in.
The fees and stuff actually got so bad that congress passed a law mandating that the banks had to allow people to opt out of overdrafts, among other things. Unfortunately, this law had been kicking around for several years by the time it got passed, so the banks had plenty of time to weaken it and/or find work arounds. For instance, where you used to get a single overdraft charge for each time you overdrafted, many banks went to a system where you got a daily charge for every day your account was in the negative. I've literally seen someone crying in the bank upon being told that what should have been a single $40 charge had grown in the course of a week or so into a $400 charge. Sadly, this is just one of many such examples of how commercial banks have changed their practices to prioritize profits over public service.
Hope that all made sense. As I said, I'm not a historian, and a lot of the stuff I discuss is widely debated, but if you find it interesting there's a lot of good info on wikipedia and youtube, not to mention your local library. :)