Bank of America (with Drive-thru ATM) — Local services in Tampa

On (06/01/19), I had the unpleasant experience of visiting this branch for 37 minutes & being unable to leave without my intended purpose (a cashier’s check). This experience could have EASILY been circumvented & avoided had the branch staff posted a note on the door entrance notifying clients that their were unable to issue money orders [MO] or cashier checks [CC],their MICR printer was down. That was not the case. After getting my foot through the door there was another opportunity for a human to spare me the painstaking 25 minutes of waiting in teller line only to be told they could not issue one. I think what is most troubling about this experience, is the greeter who directed me to the teller line to zero out my account before account closure was the Branch Manager [BM], Ryan. If he had paused, used forethought and foresight as a banking professional he could have asked some probing questions before sending a client down a rabbit hole. Or better yet, just chose to volunteer that information himself at that time. He chose not to say anything at all. I arrived at to the teller line to find this information out. I asked the teller if they would be able to contact another local branch to see if their MICR printer was working; given at that point no bank staff had not mentioned whether it was a system issue or isolated to their location. She asked another teller, who said sure and asked me to take a seat at the end of the teller line, I waited 3 minutes before standing back up to make eye contact with the tellers to see if there was any sort of update. She acknowledged me & let me know that “he was taking care of it”, nodding in the direction of the gentleman who directed me to the teller line. He was, at that time sitting down on a couch with another female patron. He eventually walked back over to the standing desk where he had been greeting people & patron followed him. I saw him pick up the phone & dial. It was on speaker, no one was picking up. His conversation with that female ended. I saw him greet 2 more patrons, during his second time greeting a customer I saw him hang up the phone & dial again (on this occasion I heard him having to select prompts to speak with a banking professional). Larger institutions like BOA are able to call over to one another branch & circumvent the entire dial by directory system, it works very much like an interoffice phone call. He spent well over 6 minutes between these 2 options, rather than waving me over to let me know he had not gotten anyone at The Shops. I had to walk up to him; immediately before he was about to talk to more customers. It is just not good business practice to have a customer wait their turn, & ask them to continue waiting (by telling me to have a seat and not inform me who was taking care of me or what the resolution time was). I confronted him about witnessing him hang up several times in between greeting customers, appalled that the his mind he likely would have continued on this path on continuously re-dialing without so much as giving me the courtesy of an update or suggesting that he call a different branch on my behalf. I had to suggest that. If you are taking care of a customer, take care of them and not half-heartedly make efforts. Ryan in a defensive and expressive fashion wanted “show me” that he what he was running into and why he was continually hanging up. So he dialed to “demonstrate” the continual ringing he was encountering. If I stood in front of him as he did all this the first time around, I would have quickly asked him to call a different branch. BUT, truly all of this is a mute point because my experience should have never occurred for the reasons...

I ask everyone who is reading this that what good is a bank who makes money off your money to refuse to help you when you are in need? And by this I don't mean that I applied for a loan or a credit card and I got declined because my credit was not good enough. I mean to get refused to help to apply for a grant or forgivable loan that the United States government is offering to small businesses. We went in to this specific branch for this reason and we got turned down because we as a company had a credit account with with them or any other financial institution. So what this means is no we are not going to let you apply for this opportunity to help your employees get paid even your stores are closed for 30 days WITHOUT asking or looking up if we have the funds in our checking account of if the credit account we have is maxed out already or not or if the limit on the credit accounts has even enough limit to pay for the payroll. I'm not even going to get in to the attitude the lady (turned out to be the manager) who greets people at the front desk on this specific date. But again when I thought about it I've never seen a smiling face and nice attitude at any of their branch. But Bank of America loves to use your money and put one teller for the entire branch and have a bunch of people sitting at every desk most of the time doing nothing and have you wait a long line just to make a quick transaction. Not to mention when they needed to be bailed out of the mess they created our tax money was at their disposal. In conclusion if I was holding a string that would make this bank go out of business I'd pull it in...

I’m extremely disappointed with this bank, especially this branch. The manager, Martin McCollum, made a careless mistake that caused serious financial problems and left me unable to pay my bills at the start of the month which has a caused a huge burden for me. I clearly handed him the correct card for payment, yet he transferred all my money to the wrong credit card a completely unacceptable error from someone in his position.

It’s been five business days with no update, no urgency, and no accountability. This was the bank’s mistake, NOT mine, yet I’m the one suffering for it. I would understood if the error was in my part but it wasn’t. And I’ve called, I’ve gone in, and all I get are empty promises and excuses saying they will call a supervisor to assist me, which they didn’t and just said all that to get me to leave. They clearly don’t care about their customers or the chaos their staff causes. How can a manager make such a silly error and then act like it’s no big deal? And doesn’t even try his best to correct it. It’s unacceptable and shows how little they value their customers.

To top it off, their online services gave me conflicting information about whether a process like this can be expedited based on the situation, I kept getting told both yes and no, which is incredibly unprofessional for such a large bank like this.

I will be closing my account immediately after this nightmare is over. I strongly warn anyone against banking with this branch or this bank at all. If you value your time, money, or sanity, take your...