--- /dev/null
+Title: A Proud Wells Fargo Customer
+Date: 2025-07-15 11:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: deniably allegorical
+Status: draft
+
+"Customer Since 1992" says the back of my [Wells Fargo Platinum debit card](https://www.wellsfargo.com/credit-cards/platinum-visa/guide-to-benefits/).
+
+I was born in December 1987. When I was four years old, my father opened a child's savings account for me at Wells Fargo with an initial deposit of a few hundred dollars. I suppose the idea was to teach me about the world of money, although I'm not sure how much there was to learn: the fact that an 0.5% interest rate on a three-figure account amounts to pennies per year could have been checked on a calculator as easily as statements in the mail.
+
+Years later, when I actually needed grown-up banking services (a credit card to buy books, then groceries; a checking account for direct deposit of wages from my supermarket job), I stayed with Wells Fargo. I didn't even treat it as a decision: all banks were the same to me, so there was no particular reason not to get the credit card and checking account from the same institution where I had already had a savings account for as long as I could remember, so I did. I can only assume this inertia was predicted decades in advance by the executives at Wells Fargo and similar institutions who decided that offering children's savings accounts was a good business decision.