A Memory of Banking Before Computer Networks

I’ll talk about retail banking in 1980 when I was a teller.

I’ll talk about retail banking in 1980 when I was a teller.

First of all, banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm, and they were never open on the weekend. If you needed cash only a very few banks had ATMs and there were no ATM networks to speak of. The protocols for Cirrus and the others had yet to be invented and adopted. Also, if you traveled, there would be no banks in say Las Vegas that were the same as your banks in California. No banks were licensed to do business across state lines. So you really needed a credit card, and they were hard to come by. Most people used travelers checks.

So banking was slower and geographically limited and it meant a great deal if you had a credit card or American Express card. There was no Discover. There were no debit cards that were acceptable outside of your bank’s ATM network, and bank ATM networks went bank by bank (until around 1986 or so). So the idea of using a bank card at a supermarket was ridiculous. To get a credit card for a gas station or a department store was a huge privilege. There weren’t many general purpose credit cards.

Nobody had automatic overdraft protection. If you bounced a check, the branch manager at your bank would get a greenbar report of all of the overdraft checks and he would approve or deny an overdraft according to his familiarity with your account and business.

Ordinary checks written say to your supermarket could take several days to clear. This was called float. It was relatively easy to float a check — so you’d write a check on Monday and you could be reasonably certain it wouldn’t hit your bank until Thursday or Friday. And of course there was no banking on the weekend, so you could easily float a check over the weekend. There was no bank by phone, so if you didn’t know how to balance your checkbook you couldn’t just go to a phone booth and dial your bank. You had to find a branch office near where you were and wait in line for a teller, and a teller would tell you your balance. If you were lucky, they could tell you which of your checks cleared and were paid.

You wouldn’t know how your stocks were doing unless you read the paper (the WSJ of course) on a daily basis. Intraday trading was unheard of. You had to call your broker and hope he would take your call. But I digress.

Deposits also took a long time to clear, so you could deposit a check on Monday and it wouldn’t clear until Wednesday or Thursday. If it was drawn on a bank from out of state, they might even put a 2 day hold on it or give you partial credit.

Very few tellers had cash counting machines and they were unreliable. So cash deposits were counted by hand, twice.

There was a world of bookkeepers, clerks, typists, stenographers, secretaries and receptionists who handled the bureaucracy of every business. So if you had sloppy handwriting, you couldn’t get an entry level white collar job, period. I ended up at the bank because I got one question wrong on an accounting test for the Beverly Hills equivalent of WeWork in 1980. My girlfriend got a job as a receptionist (lowest on the totem pole, you had to be cute and have a good telephone voice). BTW, there was no voicemail, no email, no fax. You had messengers, couriers and other schleping bagboys delivering telegrams and such. There was no encryption. People had to be trusted.

In other words, altogether things were slower and people had to be trusted more.

Originally published at https://cobb.typepad.com.