Santander Bank Betraying Old Customers For The Almighty Buck!

Santander Bank is discontinuing all safety deposit boxes. What a disgrace; providing safety deposit boxes is an essential and a super important bank service, for people have super important documents like wills that they need to know are secure and safety deposit boxes handle that concern. The Bank Executives at Santander Bank responsible for this terrible decision not only deserve to lose their job at Santander Bank but also to never have a high-ranking Bank Executive job for the entire balance of their life, their opportunists that will sell out loyal customers for their own self-interests . Banks like all businesses have civic obligations and if you are going to hold yourself out in part as a good local bank that can service people in a community for their banking and investment needs that means you offer safety deposit services if your bank has the physical size to accommodate such services!

 

Markets change as do the players in them. Just be glad if you get to keep your bricks and mortar 9-5 M-F branches. Digital banking is slowly rendering branch banks obsolete. I have noticed that my first citizens branch's staffing is getting thinner and thinner the last couple years. It is down from 3 tellers and a heavy day floater to 1 teller and a sometimes floater. All the manager/CS offices that used to be filled are now more empty than occupied.

 

This is an example of a rare economic phenomena of how increasing competition can actually drive up price.
competition can increase prices, in some cases

In this case two businesses (brick & mortar banks versus remote banking) are in competition, but they're not offering exactly the same service, not precisely, and not to some people.
For the consumers who do not value the use of deposit boxes, they find it makes more sense to use the remote banks, which have lower overhead expenses. This reduces the economics of scale and requires local brick & mortar banks not to be able to offer as competitive interest rates, which in some areas has driven them out of business.
In a normal economics situation, if consumers valued the use of deposit boxes so much, the bank would have had to start shifting its business model and increase the price of using deposit boxes, to get more of its profit from there so it can compete with remote banks. But it seems that is not what happened, which means that those using deposit boxes were reaping an economic benefit from the rest of the banking consumers who do not use deposit boxes.

If no bank offering safe deposit boxes exists anywhere nearby a community, it sounds like that might be a beginning sign of decline of that community. There is not a critical mass of consumer demand in that community to sustain certain business services.
I doubt competition from remote banking is the only reason Santander bank is closing.

 

This kind of reminds me of how payphones in public places have almost completely disappeared after the advent of mobile phones.

Once an alternative exists, people are expected to use that alternative, even if it's not convenient for all people.