Wells Fargo Bank Doesn’t Want My Business
Is “change” coming to Wells Fargo Bank?
I’m in Henderson, Nevada at Green Valley Ranch preparing to speech at James Malinchak’s Millionaire Success Secrets event.
The topic for my talk is “How to Get Google to Send You Money”, which is about making money with AdSense.
As part of my AdSense presentation, I use $50 – $75 in pennies to illustrate how little clicks add up to real money.
So every time I visit a new town to do my presentation, I need to locate two props… up to $75 in pennies and a clear fish bowl, jar or vase to pour them in.
Usually someone at the hotel’s finance department will aid in acquiring the pennies I need. We call ahead and they bill us for the pennies when we arrive.
Most times the venue will also have a container I can use to dump the pennies into. One time I broke a vase even though I promised I wouldn’t. The thing shattered into a hundred pieces. Oops.
Anyhow, Green Valley Ranch was not helpful with the pennies, so I sent my VP of Sales, Joey Montez, out to find a bank and exchange my green currency for tons of little coins.
Joey came back to the hotel over an hour later, exasperated and beaten by the Vegas heat. (It’s brutal here… I don’t know why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in the desert.)
He explained that he took a cab to the Wells Fargo Bank at 900 N Green Valley Pkwy in Henderson. It was about a mile or so from the hotel.
He asked the teller if he could exchange currency for a few bricks of pennies.
From the back of the teller area another teller yelled out, “Do you have an account with us?”
Joey responded “I am a prospect!”
Apparently she didn’t hear him and walked back to the vault to get the pennies.
Joey waited patiently while the meter for the cab was running. The teller knew he was in a hurry, but it seemed like she was taking her sweet time.
She finally came back and stacked the bricks of pennies on the counter. She then asked again, “Do you have an account with us?”
Joey said, “You know, I can look into getting an account with you guys, but right now I just need to exchange the cash for pennies.”
The stack of pennies was on the counter right in front of Joey.
The teller replied, “Sorry we don’t do that. It’s only for our merchants.”
Joey is waving the cash right in front of her and she couldn’t care less. He was asking if he needed to open an account to get the pennies and she replied that it was a minimum of $100 to open the account.
He told me that they were clearly giving him “attitude” because he wasn’t a customer. He felt like they weren’t taking him seriously. He felt humiliated by the teller.
At that point, he left the bank.
Joey walked across the street to U.S. Bank at 1000 North Green Valley Parkway and made the same request.
The tellers were extremely helpful and kind, going from drawer to drawer and to the safe to find the $75 in pennies requested.
No qualms. No attitude. No fees. They acted like they actually wanted to help.
When Joey told me this story I suggested we pay a visit to the manager at Wells Fargo.
We needed to go back out to get something anyhow, so I thought we’d throw in an extra stop. I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings with the teller with attitude.
We arrived at the bank and asked the cab driver to wait. It wouldn’t take long.
The manager was out to lunch, but the greeter pointed us to the assistant manager. It just happened to be the teller that was so unhelpful!
I calmly and kindly smiled and introduced myself. I’m standing in shorts, t-shirt and flip flops, so I’m sure the teller placed judgment on me.
I told her I run a number of businesses out of Northern Colorado and there happens to be a Wells Fargo Bank in my town.
I also told her that while I am not a customer, Wells Fargo has been on my radar.
I then proceeded to explain my problem with their bank not being able to service a simple request to exchange currency because I am not a current customer.
She was clearly not happy to see me, but she calmly replied that their system will not let them do an exchange without a customer account number. And apparently they sometimes charge their own customers a fee to exchange currency!
My mind went to a commercial spoof that Saturday Night Live did many years ago called “First CityWide Change Bank”.
Here was a spoof on a bank that did nothing but make change and I couldn’t get a so-called REAL bank to make change! The irony was amazing.
I proceeded to speak with the teller and suggested that the policy was not a very good way to turn a prospect into a customer.
She told me that she couldn’t comment on bank policy and that she didn’t have any control over it.
She was nice, but I am going to take Joey’s word that he was treated unkindly.
We left the bank content that a statement was made.
The final word on that statement is to the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank.
Why in the world would you charge your own customers to exchange currency? Shouldn’t that just be a value-added service?
And why wouldn’t you seek to exchange currency from a non-customer? Here’s a basic rule of business. When you treat the prospect like a customer they are more likely to become a customer. And besides, it’s not like you are losing any money.
But you have lost any and all hope of EVER having me as a customer, Wells Fargo.
And I am certain that every time I drive by the Wells Fargo brand on Highway 34 in Loveland, Colorado, this story will come to mind. I will remember the bank that would not make change.
Oh, and to the nice tellers at U.S. Bank in Henderson. Thank you for being decent human beings and helping us out.
Let the pennies flow!
Reminds me of a true story…
One day I walked into a branch of Charles Schwab and asked someone for the latest quote on a stock.
“Do you have an account with us?” he asked.
“Not yet”, I replied.
He cheerfully got me the quote, along with some literature about opening an account.
That was 20 years ago, and I’ve had an account with Charles Schwab ever since. I’m not making a statement about the business, but it’s the people on the front lines, serving customers and prospects that have tremendous leverage, based on how they act.
Joel is absolutely correct: Treating a prospect like a customer is one of the best ways to make them one.
There seems to be Corporate Insanity everywhere!
The German Poet & Philosopher, Goethe said, ‘treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he should be and he can become as he should.’ JOEL, that’s your ‘Treat a Prospect like a Customer,’ then maybe ….
I recently suffered the same kind of insanity. I was Forced To Resign for making an “inappropriate” racial remark about My Wife of 29 Years. I was teaching anti-discrimination law and pointed out that even though I’m ann older white guy, my wife is black. I told a story of a broker who made a racist comment in front of me because he didn’t know my dark secret (with a laugh).” After telling that story for 5 years, Kaplan kicks me out or sign a confession I’m a racist and get counseling. Has the world gone insane?
Hey Joel!
I closed my Wells Fargo account 3 years ago. It’s a VERY long saga over 8 years, but they are not a bank to do business with. Bad news. (Sometime look into what your money would go to fund if you put it into Wells Fargo. Don’t know how you feel about your money funding war, but where we choose to put our money definitely does make a difference in the world.)
Sorry you had a similar experience.
Warmest,
Jonathan
…I do work for Wells, and I can say that seventy five dollars of pennies would come close to cleaning out the entire branch. I work at a location that helps out plenty of merchants with multiple change orders a day. We would have said that we couldn’t do it and refer them to A) a bank that they banked with or B) multiple Wells Fargos so that it didn’t wipe out change orders for all the merchants nearby.
There have been a few times when people that DO bank with us come in and demand twenty thousand in cash. I’m terribly sorry, but it’s not like in movies anymore with a giant vault with gold bricks and stacks of money to the ceiling.
Another example of misconception in banking is foreign currency. We keep standard currencies for the most traveled places, but if you were say, looking for Thailand Baht, we would have to special order it. It takes a few days to ship, but we can still get it. I can’t tell you how many times that someone will come in looking for some sort of exotic currency that they need THAT DAY because they’re leaving THAT NIGHT. They didn’t bother to call ahead so the bank could order or prepare, instead they think we keep a magical money printer in the back that can print out any foreign denomination you can imagine.
Moral: Call ahead if you have something out of the ordinary so a bank can prepare for it. Otherwise, you’ll be either really lucky or sorely disappointed.
Joel,
I know this is an old post, but after reading it I felt I must also comment.
Wells Fargo in my city of Cedar Rapids, IA had handled my grandmother’s affairs for years. It was a great locally owned bank before being bought out by Wells Fargo. They handled her affairs and invested her monies and charged her $250 a month to do so.
Before she passed away in 2006 then made some very poor choices with her funds and basically lost over $200K for her in the last year she was living. They dragged out the settlement of the estate with my mother and aunt, who had no complaints with the will or anything else. They outsourced everything at twice the expense it should have been and dragged it out over two years, still charging the $250 a month do basically do NOTHING. Only after my mother and aunt threatened to sue, did they finish the estate.
I would NEVER EVER bank with Wells Fargo and frankly wasn’t surprised at all by your story.
Rod Myers
I’m proud to say I bank with Guaranty Bank in Loveland and also with USAA and I LOVE them both. Never have a problem with any of them and Guaranty is great–I love it when people like to talk to me and don’t respond in a manner of “you are wasting my time”. Bank of America-I would NEVER use them again.
Why in the world would you expect any company, bank or otherwise, to help you out if you weren’t a customer? What’s in it for them? Just reading this, is a clear indicator that you don’t understand business and you don’t understand how to make money. I think I’ll pass on your seminars…
Wells Fargo charged me $100 to process an illegal garnishment. I proved it was illegal, but it didn’t matter to the pompous ass who worked at the legal department in AZ. I only had $6 in the account, so they turned me over to a collection agency for $93. I had banked with them for years. No more!