Cayucos’ lone bank is closing

October 10, 2021

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “Life On The Mississippi, 1969,” is currently on Amazon.

By DELL FRANKLIN

Our lone little bank in Cayucos is closing. That’s what the brief letter from Mechanics Bank stated. I guess they don’t see any profit in keeping a bank in our tiny beach burg that is slowly losing locals but gaining tourists in our sterile mini-mansions — either left vacant for months or filled to the brim as Airbnbs.

I suppose Mechanics is pushing us toward banking on the internet and making sure their one-percenter stockholders make more money while they cut down the good old community-friendly services one used to receive from a bank — like not charging for checks and statements, etc.

Oh, these banks, they love to ballyhoo themselves as so loyally and gratefully serving their beloved customers and community (listen to the sappy pitches on radio), but in truth they lead the parade of one-percenters in this country as colossal bloodsuckers.

The day might come when they give us nothing back and charge us to keep our damn money in their vaults.

Missing, to me, will be the friendly faces of the women who work there. We don’t see them very often. They probably don’t get paid much. Sometimes they have to explain things to those of us who don’t work online or use ATM’s.

Sometimes they have to listen when we complain about how our pathetic little CDs are ground down to a percent of a percent while their stockholders are becoming richer and richer on our money.

It’s not their fault. I suppose these gals are just thankful to have a job. Not once in 32 plus years living in Cayucos have I ever not been treated fairly and with respect and dignity while going to the bank here.

Why else do I like going to the bank instead of doing my business online, or using an ATM to extract a few dollars from my account?

Because sometimes, like going to the market or post office, you occasionally run into somebody you haven’t seen in months or sometimes a year or even years, and you catch up. Sometimes the catching up spills out onto the sidewalk.

This is a good feeling, a feeling that maybe lifts your day.

Often, just being downtown and coming out of the bank allows you to run into people, and being there imparts a sense of belonging, which is vital in these days of community liquidating, of increasing isolation.

And how do owners of our small downtown businesses feel about no longer being able to walk a few doors down and make deposits and run into other business owners and exchange questions about how their businesses are doing?

Well, I got it firsthand that more than a few of them are pissed off.

I ran into Bill Shea, owner of the Sea Shanty restaurant as he was entering the bank, and asked him, and he was furious. “If Raelene (the manager) isn’t at the bank in Morro Bay,” he seethed, “I’m changing banks!”

I ran into a man who’s worked his own construction business here for thirty years and raised two boys and he said, “I go down to the bank just about every day to make deposits, and do business. It’s walking distance, near where I get my morning coffee. Think I’m happy losing that?”

Now, we will have to do our business in Morro Bay, seven miles away, a bigger small town that will probably be busier.

Know who else is irate? The elderly. Those older than me, at 78, are often restricted physically to Cayucos. They are used to their home bank. Some arrive on electric carts. Marc, up in Bella Vista,  has been coming down every day on his electric-powered wheelchair for 30 years. One lady told me that a few years back, when her mother was alive, she was about to get scammed when the bank replaced by Mechanics called to notify her.

I guess, according to Mechanics bank, personalization is dead.

I wonder, too, if the women who have worked at this bank for so long will stay on, or will be let go because of the down-sizing of banks in small towns across America.

As of now, they have no idea and hope for the best. But the sad fact is Mechanics is closing other banks in one big sweep and as usual the little people go first while the managers transfer.

Fact is, since I’ve been here, the past two banks have been bought out, and each time they give back less and less (their extensive new policy in tiny print is purposely so vague one can hardly decipher it but know we are getting shafted), and this Mechanics bank is the worst and should be ashamed of themselves, up in their gilded offices somewhere in America, squeezing out a little more and more, as if there’s never enough, never enough, while offering lame excuses hinting at struggling to make a profit.

Yeh, sure.

And when I drive around Morro Bay and pass the other banks in town, and there’s a few, I realize they’re no different, and the people who own them probably feel we peons should be thankful we even have a safe place to keep our shrinking, paltry funds.

I wish I didn’t need them, but I do; and like everybody else, I have to deal with being at their mercy.

It’s the way things are these days, and it probably won’t be too long until our post office goes and Cayucos will be just another landing place with an ATM on a corner and a solitary mailbox.

What will end up in the current bank when it empties? Oh, probably another real estate office to batter around in the increasingly impossible grab bag of one-percenter house hounding.

PS. For what it’s worth, we can all (who are technically able on a computer) complain to the FDIC.