I just used to walk over the road to my Natwast branch and deposit it at lunch time.
For the majority of professional Americans, we receive our pay via direct deposit so we never see a pay check. The working lower-class still uses pay checks since they're paid on a weekly basis. I think when margins are thinner, it's cheaper to write checks than to set up direct deposit.
How does that follow? People make electronic payments of a few dollars millions of times a day, with the banks still somehow making money on it. Now, paying a few hundred a week isn’t feasible?
”I think when margins are thinner, it's cheaper to write checks than to set up direct deposit.”
From what I know about automation and American banks, I (perhaps too cynically) think it’s less about being cheaper than about being more profitable for the banks.
How would maintaining the infrastructure to move pieces of paper around, check them for validity, moving the necessary cash around, etc. be cheaper than scaling an existing digital system to handle 10% or 20% more customers?
It seems to me that the obvious reasons for not using a bank account are not the ones people mention in these threads. The ones that occur to me are:
- You're not a legal resident
- You're in ChexSystems
- You're subject to some sort of legal judgment or garnishment
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck says
”A paycheck, also spelled pay check or pay cheque, is traditionally a paper document (a cheque) issued by an employer to pay an employee for services rendered. In recent times, the physical paycheck has been increasingly replaced by electronic direct deposit
[…]
A salary statement, commonly called a payslip, pay stub, paystub, pay advice, or sometimes paycheck stub or wage slip, is a document that an employee receives either as a notice that the direct deposit transaction has gone through or that is attached to the paycheck.“
The French and Swedish versions (sorry, can’t check the other ones due to language issues) of that page only discuss the pay slip, I think because “recent times” started half a century ago in those countries.
I think it also is telling that that page doesn’t even have a German or Dutch version linked to it, while https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entgeltabrechnung (German for ‘pay slip’) exists
It might be interesting for a poll: when did you last receive a physical pay check, and in which country?