Open and shut
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Another salvo in its battle to keep the banks open on Saturdays was fired off last week by the Consumer Council. It published figures re- sulting from a survey, carried out in Novem- ber, of the use private account holders actually make of their banks. These show that Saturday is the busiest day for cashing cheques and for paying in money. Nearly twice as many people requiring cash facilities visit their bank per hour on Saturday morning as at any other time per hour of the week. They also show that Saturday is by far the busiest day for using other bank facilities—deposit accounts, foreign currency transactions, overdraft arrangements, advisory services and so forth. Nearly six out of ten private customers use such facilities and, looking at average hourly attendance rates, the traffic is more than five times as heavy on a Saturday as on any other day of the week.
To withdraw from business precisely when your customers need you most is commercial lunacy. It is as though all toy shops decided to cease trading in December, all fishmongers on Fridays and all call girls after sundown. Nor is this lunacy in any way mitigated by the announcement, also made last week, that when
Saturday closing is introduced in July, banks will open an hour longer from Monday to Fri- day. People use banks on Saturdays because on qther days they are Working. For many middle- Wass customers it will be extremely inconven- ient to bank during the week between 9.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. For most working-class custo- mers it will be practically impossible. Were the banks solely concerned with their industrial, business and professional accounts, they might have some justification for confining themselves to bourgeois opening hours. What is beyond rational justification is that they should have spent untold sums advertising to non-AB clients services which in future will be unavailable on the only day such clients have time to use them.
The bankers' argument is that they have no alternative. They cannot provide services even from Monday to Friday without adequate staff, and each year it becomes more difficult to attract good youngsters into the business and prevent those in it from leaving. This cannot be denied. But why should it be supposed that Saturday opening is the principal cause of bank staffing problems and Saturday closing the in- evitable solution? That is not the experience in other walks of life. Journalists and actors and policemen and telephonists, it may safely be surmised, have as many and pressing social commitments as bank clerks. But columns get written, and theatres stay open, and arms of the law reach out and (not always wrong) numbers are obtained, on Saturdays as on other days of .the week. Even the banks themselves find it perfectly possible to man those computers they have gone in for in such a big way all the week round, on a shift system._ No one—and certainly none of the protesting consumer bodies—is asking that bank staff should normally work more than five days a week. But two years ago the then Chancellor of the Exchequer said he didn't think sufficient evidence had been produced that Saturday closing was a prerequisite to the introduction of a five-day week, and a similar view was taken by the,Prices and Incomes Board in 1967. Other large, efficient organisations are able to run five-and-a-half-day trading economically with the staff on a five-day week, and now that Oxford Street is about to follow Kensington's lead it may not be long before the whole West End of London goes over to a full six days' shopping. Why, then, should banks find it necessary to cut back on service just when shops are making it possible to give more? Is it because there is something intrinsically repul- sive about banking that is not to be found in other employment?
I think not. If the banks had been more imaginative in their public relations, more generous in their pay scales, more flexible in their response to competitive pressures (notably now from the GPO Giro), this crisis into which they have stumbled could have been avoided. The way ahead was correctly pointed by the Prices and Incomes Board. It postulated an end to the uniform, nation-wide pattern of opening hours. It called instead for the working, by rostering or by higher payments for example, of hours which could be tailored to the con- venience of the public and which vary accord- ing to locality and type of transaction. These would be discovered by 'judicious research.' .gerttly.it suonot be judicious research which is prompting the banks to slam their doors on the two million and more pecirAo who need their services on Saturday, without even offering compensating late-night opening (say until 7 or 8 p.m.) during the week.
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