Are ATMs Taking Over The World

Do you feel that Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs for short) and the ilk are taking over the world?

It does seem that these automated beasts, not just outside banks but now inside as well, together with their younger cousins, that are now invading many large and some smaller shops taking the place of the checkout operative, are becoming more and more common place. 

But the big question is, are they providing a good service to the customers that they are intended to serve? In the case of the ATM machines, the original purpose was to provide an easy ‘out of hours’ solution to customers wanting to withdraw cash from their bank, which in itself caused security problems. But now they are providing, or attempting to provide, many more services previously provided by a human at the counter.  

Are these beasts taking over the world?

Problems with ATMs seem to be, in my experience of attempting to use same, with the complexity of said machines. You really do need some tuition in their use, and this in itself presents other problems in that bank staff are not always available to provide such tuition and it is asking quite a lot to expect all customers to remember what can for some be quite a complex operation. Another shortcoming of ATMs is their expectance to read the hand writing on cheques, which can, on occasion, be quite atrocious.

We recently paid in a cheque for the sum of £167.00, the digit ‘1’ was quite small, but visible to the human eye, the ATM however decided to ignore the ‘1’, and made value of cheque £67.00. This error was not noticed by the bank, despite their claim that all cheques are subject to verification. It was only due to our checking bank statement at a later date that the error was detected. This raises two questions, one, why was this not detected on the banks so called verification process and, two, are the words and figures no longer checked by humans or machines to see they are of the same value? A more serious concern is now many times have such errors gone by undetected and not corrected. 

It seems that these machines are not to be trusted with our money and banks should seriously reconsider their use in some of these more complex tasks. 

We now have automated checkouts in many shops, something that I try to avoid like the plague. Perhaps my dislike of these automated checkouts is borne in my distrust in the ATMs in banks, but the whole process just seems so impersonal and seems like the start of fully automated shops void of any staff, what an horrendous thought.