Banking On Cookies

This has nothing to do with bailouts, derivative traders, or sub-prime mortgages. It’s about my little home town bank and how they make me smile.

Every day just inside the front door there’s a table with cookies and coffee for the customers. People can just help themselves. And believe me, they do. They go through those cookies like Walmart shoppers at a blue light special. Like hammerheads schooling for chum in the water. It’s your basic “Feed Them And They Will Come” marketing strategy, and it works like magic. This is a very profitable bank.

It’s also not one of your down-home, blue collar, casual type banks. Sure, it’s locally owned, but it’s definitely a blueblood, upper crust, high rent neighborhood money-changer. The name says it all: Country Club Bank. The thing is, my bank has 20-something branches. That means all day long, in all the posh parts of town, people are bolting down dozens and dozens of free cookies at a whole boatload of banks. That’s a lot of cookies. Every working day of the year.

This means that somewhere in the bowels of this rich, hoity-toity (but friendly) bank, somebody is constantly ordering, counting, scheduling and delivering cookies. They’re thinking about cookies all day long: where to get them, how many, what kind, and how to get the right amounts to each branch so the customers get their cookie hit. Someone’s job description, or part of it, is Cookie Manager.

This is amazing to me. With everything else the bank management has to do, like making car loans to Lexus drivers or foreclosing on their houses, they have made a decision, an absolute commitment, to cookies. Isn’t that weird?

And once you make that commitment, you can’t back out. You can’t have people coming in craving cookies and not have them. They have to be on that tray, in abundance, waiting for the gaping maws of all the people who need a fix. Somebody has to make sure that cookie platter and coffee carafe are loaded. You can’t have customers finding no cookies and going postal. Not at a bank. This isn’t some government office run by third-world level management. Like, say, the drivers license bureau or the US Immigration Service. The cookies have to BE THERE.

The logistics of this fascinate me. How do they do it? Where do they buy them? (Costco? Sam’s Club?) Do they keep them in a special Cookie Vault? Is there a special Cookie Delivery Vehicle for that bank? And does the same person buy and deliver them? Or do they deliver them with other banking-type stuff like rubber bands, hundred dollar bills, and stop-payment notices? Because, in case I didn’t mention it, we’re talking about a LOT of cookies here.

Here’s the other thing. These cookies are not anything special. They’re your basic store-bought, pre-packaged dry cookies. (Why do the English call them biscuits, anyway? Don’t they know what a biscuit is? Haven’t they ever been to Denny’s?) So we’re talking Chips Ahoy and Nabisco here. Nothing like Famous Amos or Mrs. Whats-her-name. Not even the girl scout ones. Nope. Regular out of the box grocery store cookies. But people love them because they’re FREE. And they’re free AT A BANK.

Personally, I never touch ‘em. I’m a cookie snob. But I love the amusement factor. Plus, the coffee’s not bad.

But what I really want is to meet the Cookie Manager and give him or her the Fun Job Of The Year Award.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

(NOTE: This piece was published in the June issue of The Funny Times.)