When we went out on the street and started asking people to sign a petition to ban ATM machines, we expected most of them to call us crazy or to simply ignore us. But in Barack Obama's America, banning cash machines as economic stimulus actually seems like a fairly reasonable idea to many folks.
We had a lot of people who thought it made sense to get rid of cash machines and for a variety of reasons.
Some didn't like the usage fees and concluded that the best way to get rid of the hassle was to get rid of ATMs altogether.
Other's wanted to see America return to a simpler time when we all got our money from our friendly neighborhood banker who knew your name, smiled at you and gave little Billy a lollipop after which you could hop in your horse drawn carriage and return to your candle lit home.
One woman even said that ATM machines were bad for the environment.
Had we stood out there all day we could have undoubtedly gotten hundreds of signatures on our fake petitions.
Not a single person we talked to, whether in favor of our proposal or not, seemed to consider that limiting peoples access to cash by getting rid of ATM's would be devastating to the economy. Banks close at around 5:00pm. That means that if someone runs out of cash at 8:00pm on a Friday night, they would have to wait until the next morning before they could purchase anything else. God forbid if they were to run out of money on a Saturday evening.