Modern Day David and Goliath
13 October 2006Have any of you dear readers ever been less than satisfied with your bank? Have you ever been charged fees you thought were unreasonable or unfair? If so, this little story should resonate with you.
Stephen Woodin is a small business owner in the Tampa Bay area of south Florida. In this little story Stephen is David. Goliath is the 800 pound gorilla Wachovia Bank. Stephen had his business checking account with Wachovia Bank for the last seven years. He had a regular routine where his deposits were concerned and he had a regular routine where his pay outs were concerned.
According to Stephen, he made all his deposits at the ATM, typically on Saturday morning, followed by payments to vendors and making his payroll. Stephen has always had his funds from deposits available on the next business day without fail. However, Stephen had a small check for $23 from one of his customers returned for insufficient funds. He didn’t think it was a big deal. He contacted his customer who made the check good and Stephen thought all was well.
All was not well. Wachovia, apparently as a result of that single bad check, decided to put a 10 day hold on all funds deposited to Stephen’s business account. While you might understand Wachovia’s decision, there are at least two problems with it. First, 10 days is a long time for a small business. Talk about a serious crimp in cash flow! I am a small business owner and if my bank suddenly decided to keep my deposits for 10 days I’d have a serious problem. But the worst problem was that Wachovia did not notify Stephen they had placed this hold on his account.
Stephen proceeded as he always does, making payments to others based on his deposits. That’s when the real problems began. Immediately Wachovia began charging Stephen $35 NSF fees for every payment he made to others. That rapidly added up to hundreds of dollars. Then Wachovia proceed to not pay the checks written so Stephens checks began to bounce with his vendors and some payroll checks bounced as well.
At this point Wachovia could have taken charge and provided real customer support to a long time customer. I’ve said for years that you learn much more from someone’s mistakes than from their successes. I expect people will make mistakes. How they deal with those mistakes determines for me whether I can really place faith in them. Had Wachovia simply explained what happened, taken the hold off Stephen’s account and refunded the fees, all would have been well and Stephen would have been a happy customer who likely would have sang the praises of the bank.
Wachovia chose another course. They circled the wagons and refused to budge on the account hold or the fees. The result was a spiral of more NSFs, more fees and more bounced checks. All told Stephen racked up $1298.75 in bank fees and bad check fees to others between September 5th and September 18th. Once the spiral had begin there was nothing Stephen could do to stop it.
Stephen made numerous attempts to deal with the situation through the bank. He talked to many bank employees who had previously helped him with other matters. But now he was hitting a wall. No one was able to help him and many, apparently got pretty snotty with him. Ultimately Stephen was forced to close his accounts with Wachovia and take his business elsewhere.
For most people the story would end there. Most people would lick their wounds and move on. Stephen is not most people. He decided he was not going to let Wachovia get away with their treatment of him. As far as he was concerned they had stolen his money and done so with impunity and he wasn’t going to let it go. So Stephen decided to fight back the only way he knew how. He started a web site called Wachovia Sucks and chronicled his story there. Then Stephen started printing flyers by the thousands and passed then out everywhere he went. The flyers directed people to his new web site. To date Stephen’s site has racked up 52,000 unique visitors, 1573 of which came from wachovia.com. His site is a month and a half old and he left me in the dust when it comes to traffic.
I’ve never done business with Wachovia so I have no personal experience with them. At this point I am unlikely to ever do business with them because I see how they treated a long term customer in good standing. All of us have been dumped on by the big guys at one time or another. I post this piece on Stephen’s story because I support his acetones. He’s put signs on his truck directing people to his web site. He’s passed out thousands of flyers. He’s taken on Goliath. I don’t know if Stephen will ever get what he wants out of them, which is a refund of the fees they charged him. But I know I am hearted when someone, anyone, is willing to stand up to those who would trample on people simply because they can. So I encourage my readers to visit Stephen’s site and if you have a bank horror story, particularly if it involves Wachovia, pass it along to Stephen. He’ll include it on his site along with other stories from other people who have squashed by the Goliaths of this world. I support what Stephen is doing and I hope you will too.
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October 16th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Great story! another thought would be to send a link of his blog or this post to your “big bank” customer service email address next time you get dumped on
hummm….I can think of at least one!