(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin has been thinking about economies of scale in the electronic age – and what we lose even as we gain access to greater choice.
(LUSKIN) J.J. Green was no relation of mine, but I think of him weekly, when I climb up the five granite steps he installed in 1885 at the brick building where I bank. It’s a charming building, with huge double-hung windows, high ceilings, and a wooden counter with an iron grate.
Mr. Green wasn’t just a stone-mason hired to install the stone steps. He also served as a trustee of the bank, and was station master for the local train service as well as the town’s telegraph operator. In addition, he was custodian of the Union Hall, and he farmed. In his diary for 1885, he recorded the sap run, crows pilfering his corn, haying, harvesting oats, digging potatoes and picking apples. His diary also notes that he attended services at the Newfane Church and Temperance Meetings at the Union Hall. J. J. Green died on August 20, 1886, when a bridge collapsed, plunging the afternoon freight train and passenger car into the West River.
The bank building has most certainly been upgraded with plumbing and electricity since the stone steps were installed, and the architecture is just one of the reasons I like banking there. I also like the convenience of taking care of business in the town where I work and live. I like knowing the history of the building. Even better, I like that I know all the tellers and the three branch managers who’ve served during the quarter century I’ve banked there.
Several years ago, the local banking company merged with The Chittenden Bank – a larger Vermont firm. We were issued new account numbers, and some of the policies changed, but the personnel all stayed the same. Then the bank merged again – with an even larger bank from away.
I try not to be one of those stick-in-the-muds who resents change on principle, and I might not have minded so much if it hadn’t been for the new electronic, card-swiping devices mounted on the counter in front of every teller. These are so we can identify ourselves – even though the tellers are my long-time neighbors.
What bothers me is not change per se, but the change in scale that’s outgrown the neighborliness of small town life. We now need magnetic strips encoded with personal identification numbers to recognize each other. It makes me sad, and it makes me yearn for a banking system as local and as sturdy as the stone steps set a hundred and twenty-five years ago by one J.J. Green of Newfane.