The owners of a shop on St. John have waited four years to be able to use their business’s checking account.
In a chronicle of the travail, the St. John Sun Times reports the (unnamed) bank’s policies required multiple forms of identification, completion of forms and then more forms, and when the bank changed owners, the process seemed to start over. (It’s probably FirstBank, which was sold by Chase.) The objective of getting the wife’s name on the checking account was also complicated by a branch in St. Thomas refusing to accept the bank’s own paperwork, government employees who lost records and a misaddressed "Letter of Existence" that took six weeks to arrive.
"The wife felt a fit coming on," the Sun Times’ Phyllis Benton wrote. Which, to me, makes the woman sound either line an angel or comatose. What patience!
Now, the wife says she’s gone to a "cash economy." Please, no checks. She said, “It’s just that I don’t get to the bank much anymore, and when I do, it’s like that movie, Groundhog Day; the same things keep happening over and over again."