Fidelity Tells Customers It’s Shutting Down Self-Service Kiosks
Written by Evan SchumanFebruary 25th, 2010
Traditionally, when a retailer rolls out upgraded customer-facing hardware—be it an ATM, self-checkout machine or perhaps a price-checking kiosk—the chain says nothing until it has installed the new systems. Then it can discuss the benefits the new apparatus offers the customer. Fidelity Investments apparently chose to break with tradition.
This month, an electronic message started appearing on automatic deposit machines telling investors that the machines were being "decommissioned" early this year. Some store associates added that the timing would be more like May or early summer. At first, this seemed an ordinarily unusual move, as few chains that have made the investment in self-service machines (Fidelity started rolling them out 10 years ago) bother to yank them out. But then Fidelity tried to explain the move, and what seemed merely unusual became positively surreal.
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One Comment | Read Fidelity Tells Customers It’s Shutting Down Self-Service Kiosks
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Ed
February 26th, 2010 at 2:38 am
Interesting story. Evan- do you think this could be due to some sort of fraud that was happening? Did you probe on that area? When something seems to make no sense on the surface, one has to wonder what one does not know. I can easily believe there’s a new technology they want to implement, but I agree with the question you pose… why would they rip out the old one before the new one’s ready? Fishy.