• testfactor@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Fair. We’ll have to see how it plays out. My gut is that the demand probably won’t be there, but we’ll just have to see.

    But to be clear, we’re talking about a brick and mortar bank losing between $10-40 a day. Compared to the overall quantity of money moving through it, that feels like it should be negligible. That’s, like, one to two tellers leaving an hour early.

    But yeah, the way this should be done is through an act of Congress. Agreed on that. This should really be an easy piece of bipartisan legislation, and the fact that Congress is so broken as to be unable to pass it is a huge indictment in its own right.

    • HubertManne@piefed.social
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      15 hours ago

      well each branch losing some small amount per day every day year over year. things like this are very significant for businesses. walmart drove businesses into over seas manufacturing to save a few cents on multi dollar items.

      • testfactor@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        People overstate that problem. They say “businesses” as if all businesses are the same.

        Bank of America has 3600 branches in the US. At $20/day, that’s $72k/day, or $26mil a year.

        Bank of America has $3.5 trillion dollars in assets. If they’re making 1% interest on that (they’re making far more than that, I promise), they’re making $35 billion dollars a year. So that $26mil makes up less than a tenth of a percent of their total revenue.

        Compare that to the Walmart example. First, at Walmart people aren’t just buying one thing. If my cart has 50 items in it, that’s a few cents per item. So we’re really talking fifty cents to a dollar per transaction. Second, Walmart has around 40 million customers per day. (About half of the total number of people who even have a Bank of America account, and we know that not even half of account holders are going to a brick and mortar every day.)

        So, a savings of 1¢ per item is a difference of, conservatively (assuming an average cart size of 10 items), $4mil per day, or around $1.5 billion per year. Contrast with the around $26 million from Bank of America.

        They just aren’t comparable examples. At its core, the scale issue that you’re outlining only matters if you’re getting it on a huge number of relevant things it applies to. There just aren’t that many actual cash transactions handled by BoA compared to its overall income numbers. Walmart has a huge number of individual items it sells vs it’s overall income.

        • HubertManne@piefed.social
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          15 hours ago

          Yeah I still think its not as paltry for the business as you make it out to be. My prediction still is that banks say. Hey. We need pennies at some point (unless congress makes it official)