Fortune Magazine article about the history of ATMs. Need to read (or at least you did until I posted this) all the way to the end to get to the most interesting point:
"The ATM clearly fell short of expectations in one area, though. It never reduced the number of tellers or filled the demand for bank branches—something the machine's pioneers had promised. According to the FDIC's count, there are close to 75,000 branches today, up from under 58,000 in 1985. Tellers number 539,000, vs. the 484,000 in 1985—though many of them now also function as retailers, cross-selling IRAs and mortgages to customers who come in with a big deposit. And that is something human beings still do better than any machine. For now."
ATMs, like phone tellers and online banking and bill pay, don't eliminate jobs or save money, they just give customers a little more of what they want: freedom.
Friday, July 23, 2004
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