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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Side note: are there still places that have safety deposit boxes? Nearly all the banks in my area no longer offer them.

By "bank" do you mean one of those "customer experience centers" which offers the usual teller services and on-site card replacements, and has maybe 1 or 2 people working as tellers but none of them are loan-officers, and instead of a vault they have a convenience-store-style safe?

"Real bank" branches do still exist - but they aren't as commonplace as they used to be. My nearest one for my credit-union is a good 45 minute drive away, ugh.

My local BofA offers it, and then somehow needed to close the branch for a few years during the pandemic. Was really inconvenient to access the box in a locked, unstaffed branch.

If you look into those, they aren't really safety deposit boxes. The bank isn't obliged to actually protect the contents or to reimburse you if something happens.

It's in a bomb-proof vault with tremendous amounts of on-call security and police. The second a bank alarm goes off it's swarmed with cops, well before anyone could ever open the vault. There is zero practical way to rob a closed bank vault unless there was also, like, a zombie apocalypse happening and the cops were all otherwise occupied

Was that ever the case? Even if you rent a storage unit for instance you need to insure it.

Your lawyer's bank vault is still okay. Beyond that, you're pretty much screwed.

Wells Fargo still offers them. FWIW.

They had looong waiting lists in most places in the Bay Area, though.

Yes, tons of banks still have them

Not for long, likely.

Chase in San Francisco told me that one factor is a handful of deposit box users who come into their branch multiple times/day to access their box. That’s a huge burden on their staff’s time.

Should not be that hard to put a cost on that. Charge X per access. Make X big enough to be worth the bother. If you worry that it will alienate the users who only need access rarely make the first Y accesses per month or year free.

It's funny how cost cutting turns once normal services and responsibilities into a "burden".

Safety deposit boxes are not meant as active drop boxes.

It's like someone using YouTube as a general purpose data storage service.

It’s very easy to fix that. Charge per use for accessing it more than once per day.

In fact, that already exists. Nearly every bank, Chase included, operates a savings account with maximum six transactions a month.

why is that?

My local Wells Fargo does.

your local credit union does and they are awesome and cheap.

My local credit union is getting rid of them. I was kicked out last year, and they told me the branches that still have them probably won't for long.

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