It's pretty mental that the US still uses cheques for paying employees. I'm 26 and have never been given a cheque and all payments have been electronic.
My first paycheck from my first summer job in high school was a check, and my severance from my last company was by check. Other than that, it's all been electronic. My previous three jobs don't allow regular paychecks by physical check, you have to have direct deposit. Physical paychecks are definitely the exception, not the norm.
There's also a lot of resistance to electronic banking in... certain circles. I'm not sure what they think "normal" banking when you speak to an actual teller is.
In the USA as of 2017, 8.4 million households (6.5% of households) don't have any bank account. [1]
Where? Everywhere I've banked offered checking accounts for completely free with no minimum balance, and I know many credit unions operate this way. If you're paying money to your bank, stop it.
> Add to that the fact that many banks purposely reorder transactions to force you to take as many overdraft fees as possible, banking for those living paycheck to paycheck is not cheap
This is really scummy but many banks allow you to, for debit cards, deny the transaction instead of overdrafting. That won't help with bounced checks or electronic transfers but it can make a big difference.
Most major banks in the US require something if not a minimum balance to waive the monthly fee. Something like $x threshold for certain direct deposits, or you're a student/young adult, or you use your debit card x times a month.
Smaller banks and credit unions can have problems too: locations or lack of participating ATMs or the same problems as the big banks. There are absolutely scenarios where it can be easier (time and money-wise) to just go to the check cashing store.
Some unbanked people are undocumented and afraid to open accounts that might be closed/seized. Some have piss poor credit. Some of those folx won't be able to open new accounts because their chexsystems report has some negative item on it. A single issue like your car breaking down once can snowball into a much bigger situation.
> deny the transaction instead of overdrafting
Honestly, for paycheck to paycheck folx, this can still hurt. There won't be $200 in overdraft fees, but imagine, your PG&E bill is now past due because they couldn't charge your card. Now they want $20 for reconnection on top of the past due bill and 2x more in the form of a deposit due to bad credit. Welp, maybe the $200 in overdraft fees would have been easier to deal with.
Living paycheck to paycheck sucks for so many reasons, and so many of those reasons out of the individual's control.
That's an odd way to phrase it, since it doesn't seem like a particularly large sample as you state it. So how many individuals are you talking about, given your turnover?
So I walked a $300K check from my bank two blocks to my escrow company to save the $50. The check must have been more expensive for everyone to handle (even at the bank, they had to wait for a manager to operate the special "check typewriter" - not everyone was allowed to operate it), but for whatever reason, it was "free".
Also MyPayrollHR did have direct deposit:
> This communique came after employees at companies that depend on MyPayrollHR to receive direct deposits of their bi-weekly payroll payments discovered their bank accounts were instead debited for the amounts they would normally expect to accrue in a given pay period.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/09/ny-payroll-company-vanis...
US banking is a decrepit mess because the treasury allows it to be.
And no one in the US has problems sending and receiving money from anyone else in the US either...
The parent's point is that legacy systems still exist in the US, as I'm sure they do in the EU. That doesn't mean that getting paid by a paper check is particularly common for regular workers. The vast majority of people are paid electronically. No one likes dealing with checks and for the most part no one really has to. The only times I ever do that is when I'm paying a contractor many thousands of dollars for e.g., work on my house. Usually those guys are older and self-employed, and either don't know how to accept money electronically or don't want to because of fees (and I don't blame them). In those instances I get a cashier's check made. That's the only time I have to deal with it.
There are of course instances where an employer might not provide direct deposit because they find the added expense too much to bear (as another poster pointed out). We're not living 50 years in the past, as you might imagine. Checks are not particularly common.
And the actual point is that no, they don't, they were cleared away because their existence is a pox on everyone.
Having seen both systems upclose, for the average consumer the European banking system is about a hundred years in the future from the American one, which is a steaming hot cesspit of legacy systems and banking institutions that spend all their time figuring out ways to milk more money out of consumers.
Case in point:
> or don't want to because of fees
It's not okay to charge people fees to send or receive money.
(Technically, European banks still can do that, but since the EU has forced all banks to accept transfers from each other using a common system, and that all money transfer are executed as "shared fees" where the sender pays the fee to their institution and the receiver pays the fee to theirs, free and open competition has driven the price of sending and receiving money to 0€.)
You’re telling me checks don’t exist in the EU anymore? Forgive me for being skeptical.
> where the sender pays the fee to their institution and the receiver pays the fee to theirs, free and open competition has driven the price of sending and receiving money to 0€.)
You’re gonna have to elaborate, because that sounds like both parties pay money to perform an exchange, which is even worse than what we have, where one party does.
Are you saying that if I wanted to pay someone $100 I have to cough up an additional $5 and the receiving party has to pay $5 to get their $100? In what way is that “no fees” unless the receiving party is reimbursing the paying party directly? Unless I’m missing something here, a transfer of $100 cost $110 under this system.
You pay the fee to your banking organization, which is 0€. The receiver pays the fee to their banking organization, which is also 0€.
Or in other words, there are no fees.
The idea being that the EU has made it very easy to switch banks, and forced a regime where a customer can freely pick the bank that has the lowest fees, which lead to a situation where no bank that wants to retain customers can bill them for transferring money.
They still exist in a couple countries but have completely disappeared in most. When wire transfers are free to consumers and cost cents to business account holders, why would anyone use something else?
I worked in a bank for a bunch of years, a decade ago we were processing <100 checks a year, which was an unusual (and expensive) service; about half of the checks was companies doing international sales to unusual countries and the other half was scams; so that business was shut down - some banks do offer a service of cashing checks, but many banks will not.
A wire transfer to an account in another banks is (depending on your bank) either free or something like 0.15-0.30 eur, certainly cheaper than a stamp if one would need to send a paper check.
All of which is disturbing to me now but I was young and dumb and didn't stay with them long.
(A few years earlier, I had an after-school job at K-Mart and they paid everyone with actual cash in an envelope!)
Also, the government no longer sends out physical social security checks, they stopped doing that like five years ago.
They also refuse cash and donation as a settlement, so in the spirit of the deceased I don't cash it, and a new one arrives every six months.
I guess I'll find know the Solicitor has retired when the cheque stops coming...