Several Local St. Louis Banks Consider Offering Services Through Cell Phones

Being a mid-baby boomer I must confess that I have been somewhat slow to enter the Internet age. In some cases I have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it. CD's were on the market for several years before I caved in and bought a CD player and I still don't have an MP3. Download what? I'm perfectly content to dust my scratchy old vinyl and start up the turntable. Of course my record collection numbers in the fifties while a friend of mine has like 7,000 songs available to listen to on his IPod.

Take banking for instance. I remember when you either wrote a check or paid cash for everything. Then the banks came out with a telephone banking service. You could check your balance and make transactions over the phone. How convenient. Then they put everything on line and started eliminating paper checks. The first step in doing this was to eliminate the practice of sending you your canceled checks with the monthly statement. Now you might get a photocopy if you are lucky. Banks now want you to use your debit card for everything, even to buy a 50-cent newspaper. Just look at the ads that Visa runs where everything is running super smoothly at the store until some prehistoric Neanderthal tries to pay for his purchase in cash or with a check. I'm surprised that I still see drop out advertisements for check printing companies in my Sunday paper. It's a wonder how they stay in business. Most people I know say they might write a couple of checks a year now.