I stopped into my local Wawa this morning to pick up some cash and some milk. Wawa offers free-of-charge ATM withdrawals, which pleases me greatly. However, the ATM, managed by PNC Bank, needs some edits to its software.
Please study the image below.
You will note that a withdrawal of $10, $30, or $50 are all listed as possible options for obtaining cash.
When I asked for $50 earlier this morning, I ran into the following notice.
Wait! What? Withdrawals have to be in multiples of $20? Then why even give me the other options? Arggghhh …
The moral is “don’t trust any institution named ‘WAWA’.”
@ AM,
Au contraire! Wawa is a fantastic place. I am constantly amazed at how nice it is.
I believe the culprit here is the PNC Bank.
And according to PNC customer support, the max amount you can ACTUALLY withdraw per day is $500. Hmm. Scoundrels.
As soon as I started reviewing the screen I thought “Odd… I haven’t seen an ATM handing out $10s in a decade or two.”
Being old enough (45) and having worked for a computer operations center at a bank in Florida back in the early 1980’s I can tell you that early ATMs dispensed $5’s!
$5’s!!
Those were the days…
Maybe it is called Wawa cause that is the sound many of its customers make when they realize not all options offered are actually options.
Kudos to K on that one
Could be that the machine is out of $10 bills. Not knowing how the code is written, I can’t say how easy it would be to check the contents of the cash dispenser before displaying the screen and either not display or “grey out’ options that are not available.
@ antfaber,
Well, if the machine has to check whether $10 bills are available at some point (and certainly it would, if it dispenses them at all), then changing the point (in the overall cash-request-dispensing process) at which that test takes place couldn’t be that difficult to do. Instead of checking after a cash request is made, it could run that test prior to displaying the withdrawal options. In the event that $10 bills weren’t an option, the code could be written to display only the limited options, along with a note explaining why.
Of course, I appreciate that updating the code across (presumably) hundreds or thousands of ATM machines is not necessarily a simple task. Software upgrades can be costly and time consuming.
I think banks in general offer such atrocious options to their customers because they’re not interested in paying back the loans (i.e. checking, savings accounts etc) their customers have given them. They’re more interested in keeping your money in their account which they share with you and tell you is your account.