Issue #31 – Thursday,
November 8, 2018
Posted by Denny Hatch
The Bankers That Trashed a Beloved USP
For my money, loose change is a pain in the neck.
Especially pennies. The U.S. Mint—which spends 1.82¢ to make a penny—lost
$69 million last year producing pennies.
(Actually that’s a good deal. It costs the Mint 7¢ to produce a nickel!)
For many years we had a change jar into which went our spare change at
the end of the day. Every three months or so, the jar overflowed. So began
sorting, stacking, squeezing stacked coins into paper tubes and carting them
down to the bank.
It probably takes one hour to sort, stack and stuff coins into tubes.
This is not only boring and time consuming, but also a lousy ROI (Return on
Irritation).
Commerce Bank’s Crown
Jewel
Imagine our delight when two blocks from our house in Center City
Philadelphia, Commerce Bank opened a branch with all normal banking services.
Plus a crown jewel—the magnificent Penny Arcade coin counter you see at
the top of this post.
We immediately opened accounts at Commerce Bank—personal checking,
corporate and savings. As a welcome goodie, they gave us a free safe deposit
box for a year.
Easy Peasy No More
Squeezy!
Instead of squeezing stacked coins into flattened paper tubes, we
could take a plastic shopping bag of mixed coinage down to the bank and dump it
into the Penny Arcade.
We ended up with a little printed receipt that could be presented to a
teller who would give us cash (bills and a few coins) or simply deposit the
total in our checking account.
In terms of P.R., the
Penny Arcade was brilliant.
Little kids were delighted because a goofy recorded voice talked them
through the process. The whirring and clanking sounds heightened the
excitement—like a circus orchestra.
Kids could also win a prize for guessing in advance the total amount
their coins would bring it.
It was a hoot—a veritable automated Frank Brock, who was The
World’s Greatest Banker! Brock, president of the First Bank of Troy, Idaho
had 6,000 active accounts worldwide in a town of 555 residents. How? He got
children into the bank and kept them for life.
The Penny Arcade Was a
Beloved USP!
Remember the USP—the memorable Unique
Selling Proposition—that feature/benefit that makes your product or service
stand out from the competition:
Memorable
USPs—Unique Selling Propositions
“99 and
44/100% pure.” —Ivory Soap (Procter & Gamble, 1892)
“The skin you love to touch.” —Woodbury Soap, (J. Walter Thompson Co., 1911)
“When it rains it pours.” —Morton Salt (N.W. Ayer & Son, 1912)
“We try harder.” —Avis (Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1983)
“We’ll leave the light on for you.” —Motel 6 (Richards Group, 1988)
“Bags fly free.” —Southwest Airlines (GSD&M, 2010)
Trashing the USP
In 2007, TDBank (Toronto Dominion) bought Commerce Bank for $8.5
billion. Nine years later Peggy and I moved six blocks and began doing business
with the Penny Arcade at the TDBank branch nearest us.
Two years ago I lugged a bag of coins to my TD Bank branch.
The Penny Arcade coin
sorter was gone!
“Where’s the coin sorter?" I asked a young officer at desk in the
lobby.
“We’ve discontinued the service.”
“What? Why?”
“Management decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“Does another branch have a coin counter?”
“They’ve been removed from all 1,300 branches.”
“Can I take these coins to a teller and get them counted?”
“Bring them in rolls and we can accept them. You won’t be charged for
the service.”
Enter Lawyers
The bank was the subject of both a New York lawsuit and a report on
NBC, which found the machines short changed multiple deposits of $300 worth of
coins by as little as 5 cents and as much as $43.10. "Offering free
coin-counting to our customers has been a long-standing service at TD,"
said Michael Rhodes, the head of TD's consumer banking. "However, recent
accounts regarding the performance of our Penny machines have led us to
reassess this offering. We have determined that it is difficult to ensure a
consistently great experience for our customers." —Chris Isidore, CNN
Money
Here’s How to Get Your
Money Back
The bank, headquartered in Cherry
Hill, removed all the coin counters. But they still faced a class-action lawsuit from plaintiffs in three
states seeking to recoup the amount they believe they were
shortchanged over the years. Now, after four mediation sessions and much back
and forth, the bank has agreed to a settlement that would cost it more than $9
million dollars. Of that, nearly $7.5 million will be shared among customers
who used the machines, if the settlement gets final approval. —New Jersey Real-Time News
The End
Takeaways
to Consider
• With no
Unique Selling Proposition, TDBank can no longer call itself “America’s Most
Convenient Bank.” It’s like every other dreary local bank.
• If 50
Penny Arcade users in each of TDBank’s 2450 U.S. and Canadian branches are
unhappy, that’s 122,500 pissed-off customers.
• Commerce/TDBank
exhibited sloppy research by lazy incompetent decision makers.
• The result: CRM
(Customer Relationship Misery).
• All banks have machines
in the back that can measure coinage to the penny.
• A quick search on
Google turned up four industrial coin counter manufacturers: Cummins
Allison, SCAN
COIN, CTcoin
and GLORY.
• It seems to me any one
of the above would be delighted with an order 2450 coin counters, would
be thrilled to gussy them up for consumer use and keep them running perfectly
under a maintenance contract.
• A bank with a public coin counter that cannot accurately count coins is a jerkwater institution and a good reason to switch banks.
• A bank with a public coin counter that cannot accurately count coins is a jerkwater institution and a good reason to switch banks.
• “Always go first
class.” —Bob Teufel, President of Rodale Press
• The only people who
make money on class action suits are lawyers.
###
Word count: 903
Well, that was certainly a depressing read. Thank you for including us. :-(
ReplyDeleteMaybe our local bank's coin sorting machine has been short-changing us all these years -- another depressing thought.
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
DeleteYeah, this is depressing.
There's a marketing lesson here.
I once worked for an old time book salesman, Henry Castor, who used to cry out periodically: "God protect us from amateurs!:"
Cheers.
Do as they did in Canada - get rid of pennies. Next step, make multi-colored bills. How many times have you passed over a twenty thinking it was a one?
ReplyDeleteLove the idea of axing pennies. Probably too many retailers who love prices like $24.99 that seem like $24 when it's really ¢25.
ReplyDeleteCheers.
Good afternoon, Denny!
ReplyDeleteFor whatever reason, I have never minded having change in my pocket, and so just carry it and use it throughout the day. However, once, I was treasurer for a group that generated a lot of change. I encountered the paper tube problem too. What I found was that grocery store customer service desks had counting machines, desired change, and did not hassle me. So, I started taking all my change to the grocery. Even with their tiny profit margins, they seem to have a better idea of customer service than banks!
Greetings, Tim,
DeleteSomewhere in my files is the story of Peggy and me going separately to our old TDBank branch to have them okay our bank cards for rubles from cash machines in Moscow. Neither card worked in Moscow—a city where the cyrillic alphabet renders everything unreadable to Americans. We spent most of a day looking for cash—stoopid use of time 4,741 miles from home in one of the historic cities in the world. My opinion of customer service at banks matches yours. Generally it sucks. Do keep in touch!
We call it "Customer Dis-Service."
DeleteMy wife and I now run every possible purchase through a series of rewards credit cards, which is a whole other scam altogether - I hate that someone is paying a bank points just to take my money, but I can't turn down the Amazon credit and other cash back.
ReplyDeleteBut back when I used to use cash, and coincidentally also liked to gamble, I would fill up one of those gallon wine jugs and take it to the casino, where they would happily count it for free.
I now use cash only for haircuts every few weeks, and bridge tolls every few months, and I haven't gambled since the 90's.
Still, coins build up from time to time. Our local grocery store has a coin sorter (Maybe CoinStar?), but it collects around 12% and my jug holds about $200, and it'll be a very cold day in hell before I pay CoinStar $20 to count my own money.
Still waiting on a class-action settlement on the repair fees from the company that guaranteed the solar panel installation on our roof for 20 years and sold our account to another solar company that declared bankruptcy, all within year two. That's $800 I'll never see, plus the fact that it generated no electricity for about 18 weeks.
I too was annoyed and saddenedsat the demise of Penny Arcade. Thanks for the lowdown. I guess we'll be getting one of those CA settlement soon. BTW banks are evil to their employees too: my sister worked 20+ years for every type--family owned local, transnational giant, and private--and all of them sucked. The only reason banks remain in business is, as Willie Horton said, that's where the money is.
ReplyDelete