The Economy

Royal Mail started offering financial services years ago. I think the idea is that small-town post offices would be where it matters most. There are more than 34,000 post offices and fewer than 5,000 Walmarts.

 

... but you can't pick up a sixer, a Slim Jim and a pack of smokes at the post office.

 

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor stickup.

 

From 1911 to 1967, the U.S. Postal Services offered banking services under the United States Postal Savings System. The reason that seems bizarre to you is because you weren’t alive when it existed.

The FDIC estimates that 80 million Americans are unbanked or underbanked. In 1985, there were 18,033 banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. across the nation; by 2018, there were just 5,477. Lot of consolidation happening there, not nearly as much competition as there was a few decades ago, and a lot of local branches eliminated for reasons that are at best dubious. It’s eliminated a lot of face-to-face interactions between banks and customers; this Barron’s op-ed author argues that the decline in community banks has hurt entrepreneurship (for all the talk of the American start-up economy, the actual number of start-up businesses is far below what it was three decades ago).

If it puts some form of banking services back in places that big banks have decided they don’t want to go, it probably isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it’ll force the big banks to expand their footprints rather than shrink them.

 

I like that you presented data, because I might just be blinded by personal experience. Both in Rhode Island and Texas, it seemed like the *only* things being built were community banks, as well as CVS'es and Rite Aids, and breweries. I think SNL even had a skit about it at one point. However, I don't think putting banks at post offices means that those 80M people are going to open checking accounts. I kind of assume those 80M don't have bank accounts because they don't want them, or, because they're unaware of the benefits. Neither problem is solved by putting banks at post offices. It just forces USPS to offer another service that may or may not make sense for a given area.

 

Try online banking or even try to find an ATM when you live in BFE — real, Montana-style, no-cell-service BFE. It's probably not necessary in most parts of urban areas except the poor ones.

 

Wait, wasn’t this going to force everybody back to work?

 

It was always bull

 

Shit, put those shiftless 8-year-olds back into the mines where they belong.