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.
+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. (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.)
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+I don't know why my father chose Wells Fargo in particular. Or I say, "My father chose," but I have no episodic memory of the event. It's clear that I wouldn't have independently asked for a bank account, but it's not too farfetched to imagine him offering me a choice between Wells Fargo or Bank of America or Chase or whatever other banks were around.
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+If he had offered me a choice, on what basis would I have made it? As a four-year-old, there's no way I could have meaningfully understood the differences between different banking plans and made a rational decision based on a cost–benefit analysis. If I had chosen, it would have been a choice based on information a small child could understand: maybe I liked the letter _W_, or the pony and wagon on the logo. And by the power of sticky defaults, that child's choice—or more likely, my father's—would go on to determine my banking future for three decades to come and more.
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+As it happens, I don't think I've suffered for being a Wells Fargo customer. I don't particularly think I was wrong to consider all banks the same when it was time to get a checking account in 2006—and if I was, it wouldn't have been difficult to switch, then or later.
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+There was one time a few years ago when I had occasion to have low four figures in cash on hand during a trip
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+[TODO: was Chase a thing in 1992? is there Bank of America on the East Coast? Does my father remember anything about this?]
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