I haven't set foot in a bank branch in over a year, and then only to deal with a problem caused by the confluence of their antiquated model and that of another company.
I've never once made a phone call to, or received one from, my current bank in the ~7 years my current checking account has been open.
I don't know who you think they're maintaining such anachronisms for, but it ain't this free checking user.
The computer systems have to be created and maintained for their wealthy depositors regardless. The marginal cost of adding less affluent customers is laughable, and more than paid for by the interest they can earn from a few hundred dollars in deposits.
That was pretty much the case whenever I went in to a bank branch in past years. Often I was the only one there, never was the employee to customer ratio less than 5:1, and anyone who was there was most likely to be 60+.
A visit to a physical bank branch is the anomaly today, not a lack thereof.
The thing that matters is that those are available to you. The bank does some modeling on how much use all of those facilities will get, and plans accordingly. You figure into that planning whether you go or not. I don't know the stats on how many free checking users use bank branches, but we both know it's more than zero. Same with phone service.
As far as the computer systems, those scale with number of accounts, not number of dollars. Given that the majority of accounts are likely to be free, or low net-worth accounts, it stands to reason that free checking customers make up a significant portion of the cost of operating these systems.
I've never once made a phone call to, or received one from, my current bank in the ~7 years my current checking account has been open.
I don't know who you think they're maintaining such anachronisms for, but it ain't this free checking user.
The computer systems have to be created and maintained for their wealthy depositors regardless. The marginal cost of adding less affluent customers is laughable, and more than paid for by the interest they can earn from a few hundred dollars in deposits.