Question: Should I close my Wells Fargo bank account?

Answer:
Not necessarily. That’s like being a deer covered in ticks and you think removing ONE tick is going to make you healthy.

This is about the Wells Fargo scandal, where apparently 5,000 low-wage white-collar workers ignored their “ethics training” to create sham customer accounts in order to make wildly unrealistic sales goals. The excuse was “but they needed a paycheck”.

It’s actually kind of brilliant. Wells Fargo knew this was going on for years, and they washed their hands of it by providing a sort of finger-waggling ethics training with a nod and a wink.

That ethics training was actually how-to training in disguise. “Here’s what we want you NOT to do (wink, wink). Oh, by the way, you shouldn’t do X, Y, or Z either. In other news, our top salespeople grew their quotas by 37% – everyone else is officially under-performing.”

It really reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s book “Thud” (which is about a race war), describing how “community leaders” were saying “for gods sake don’t take the shiny new weapons out of that cabinet… no, no, that cabinet over THERE.”

Hey kids, don’t do drugs either, especially the ones that are reputed to be fun!

The reason I say don’t bother closing your account is that this sort of thing is practically ubiquitous. Of course, go ahead and switch over to a credit union if it makes you feel any better.

I’ve been a WF customer since 1998 and frankly I don’t want to change over all my online accounts at this point. Better the devil you know…