Walmart's effort to get customers to build up their savings accounts

And yet, thousands of people who started using the cards have increased their savings more than they would have otherwise. Yes a credit union is preferable, but the point is that this demographic of people wasn't using them (or regular banks) and that these cards have encouraged better behavior through a new psychological angle. If the net result is positive, I wouldn't get hung up on the fees.

It's not the norm. Most Americans (at least in my experience) will go out of their way to use an ATM that doesn't charge them. Accordingly, picking a bank with a large ATM network is a major consideration when choosing a bank. Some smaller banks compete with this by reimbursing fees charged by out-of-network ATMs, making all ATMs effectively free.

It is certainly possible to pay for those services, but it's not normal. Some people let it happen out of laziness, or due to not being aware that they can do better.

We do have a fees problem, but it's mostly with other services. For example, many banks will charge some outrageous amount (like $5, outrageous compared their cost) to give you an electronic copy of a past bank statement. High overdraft fees are common. If you accidentally use your debit card to make a purchase that exceeds what you have in your account, the bank will often charge you a ~$35 fee rather than reject the transaction. This is optional, but they push it hard and sell it as a "service," since it means you're never left unable to complete your transaction. Never mind that being out a bunch of money is bad too.

Even worse, some banks (at least for a while) would intentionally maximize your overdraft fees by sorting your transactions on any give day from largest to smallest before applying them. For example, imagine if you have $99 in your account, and you use your debit card to make purchases, in order, of $1, $1, $1, and $100. The last transaction should overdraw the account, hit you with a $35 fee, and your balance will be -$39, right? Wrong! They'll run the $100 transaction first, overdrawing the account, and then run the $1 transactions on the overdrawn account. Net result: four $35 fees and a balance of -$144.

So yes, many of our banks suck, especially larger ones, but it's not quite as bad as everyone paying to withdraw and deposit.

Even that 'wretched' existence doesn't have to be wretched - depending upon the external environment. I've been camping for extended periods with little more than that. Its not comfortable, but the experience was way better in many ways that my 'comfortable' cubicle.

billing systems always expand to be as maximally complicated as the system will survive. Consider telephone billing toward the end of the last century, until the cost of billing exceeded the revenue from exotic billing systems, there were all kinds of insane schemes about internal, intra-LATA, inter-LATA, in-State, nationwide-LD, international, it was a complete circus. Eventually the cost of administrating that exceeded every other cost of providing service and now we just get "minutes" or even unlimited (provided with a weirdly billed data plan of course)

For another laugh buy a house or car with a loan and there's zillions of little fees and commissions tacked on to the base price. Complexity only increases over time, and it only decreases with collapse.

This is part of the logic of the old great depression "liquidate liquidate liquidate" guy who sounds heartless in retrospect but in practice the only way to reallocate poorly allocated resources in the modern capitalist system is to flush and start over, so not knowing the GD was going to be as bad as it turned out, the guy was correct, the faster the obsolete stuff gets flushed, the faster we get back to real living. Which is analogous to current conditions, and why many people are unhappy nothing has been fixed in the banking system (or another example is health care, obamacare and trumpcare have in common that they fix none of the core problems, which is our health care allocation system is an expensive disaster)

"living paycheck to paycheck is now a commonplace middle-class experience"

Gaslighting. They're in the poverty class but that sounds bad to people propagandized to believe they're middle class. You're not poor, you're just a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire and you should base all your political decisions and worldview on that rather peculiar belief.

They're middle class, the same way I'm upper class nobility because I was awarded a college degree complete with a title of "Bachelor of CS". Some guys are titled "Duke of York" some guys are titled "Bachelor of Computer Science" no big difference. I hold a title to property, sure its only an acre of suburb land not a hundred thousand acre barony, but whatevs, I'm practically landed nobility. Only people with a title as distinguished as mine are allowed to hold corporate positions such as mine, we can't have a mere untitled commoner writing programs now can we? Or would you prefer to hear a nice rant on who is the real nobility of the glorious and ancient title of "engineer" and who is a mere pretender to the throne?

USA is full of gaslighting top to bottom.