There is a magic trick happening at the ATM, and you are the volunteer. You insert your card to withdraw your own money — money you earned, money you deposited, money with your name on the account — and the machine charges you for the privilege of handing it back.
Not your bank's ATM? That will be a fee from the machine's owner. And a second fee from your own bank, for the offense of using a stranger's machine. Your money gets charged twice to travel forty feet from an account to your hand, a journey shorter than the one it makes when you drop a quarter.
The convenience store ATM is the final boss of this economy. It sits beside the beef jerky, humming, offering your own cash back at a markup that would embarrass a stadium hot dog vendor. In that moment, with a line behind you and a card already in the slot, you pay it. We all pay it. The machine knows. The machine has always known.
Then there is the balance inquiry fee, a charge I regard as a work of art. The machine knows your balance. It is free for the machine to know. Telling you, however — displaying a number it is already thinking — costs extra. That is not banking. That is a toll booth on a fact.
Banks have refined the art beyond the ATM, of course. Paper statement fees, for mailing you a letter about your money. Inactivity fees, for the crime of leaving your money alone, which used to be the entire point. And the overdraft fee, the heavyweight champion: a hefty charge applied at the precise moment the bank has established, with data, that you do not have much money.
Somewhere in a boardroom, a person once said the words "fee income" to applause. That person has never stood barefoot in a gas station at midnight, deciding how much their own twenty dollars is worth.
It is worth twenty dollars. It was always worth twenty dollars. The fees are worth nothing, and that sucks.