• by Thom Forbes , May 1, 2019

Twitter was in a twit after Chase Bank offered some unsolicited and patronizing advice to its patrons about how to save money in its #MondayMotivation tweet. The advice, which has been exorcised from the bank’s feed but not from outraged responses that featured screen shots of the ill-advised dad talk, was to make coffee at home, eat what’s in the fridge and walk three blocks rather than take a cab.

“A horrible consequence of the historical mistake that is Twitter, in addition to the Nazis and @realDonaldTrump, is that corporate brands feel the need to tweet in a voice they think will appeal to the youths. It’s that thinking that led to this little piece of comedy writing from Chase Bank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions…,” Bess Levin observes for Vanity Fair, taking the opportunity to trash the whole concept of disseminating everything from hate speech to folly to brand ambassadorship in 240-character snippets.

Indeed, “every Monday, some poor ‘brand ambassador’ at Chase has to post a ‘Monday motivation’ tweet aimed at convincing people that one of America's largest, most rapacious banks is actually a cuddly, responsible business whose $12 billion bailout from Uncle Sam was perfectly justifiable and sure to be put to excellent use,” Cory Doctorow suggests on BoingBoing.

“These are uniformly terrible, but they hit a new low yesterday with a since-deleted tweet that took the form of a dialog between ‘You’ and ‘Bank account’ in which ‘You’ failed to grasp that your buying coffee in coffee shops, eating out, and taking taxis are why your balance is so low, to the enormous frustration of poor old ‘Bank account.’”

Cale G. Weissman, a staff writer/editor at Fast Company, picks up on the theme of Chase’s excess of largeness and lack of largesse: “extremely cool tweet here from a bank worth $400B that charges anywhere from $2.50 and $5 for individual ATM fees and $34 per overdraft -- both of which are taxes on poor people.”

Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, not the only politician to leap at the opportunity to fire back, also used the fake dialogue technique to make her points: 

“@Chase: why aren’t customers saving money?
Taxpayers: we lost our jobs/homes/savings but gave you a $25b bailout
Workers: employers don’t pay living wages
Economists: rising costs + stagnant wages = 0 savings
Chase: guess we’ll never know
Everyone: seriously?”

“Some users shared a photo of Paris Hilton wearing a shirt that reads ‘stop being poor’ to show how out of touch they felt the bank’s notion was,” reports Rachel E. Greenspan for Time.

“This genre of personal finance advice has long been discredited. Personal finance expert Helaine Olen calls it ‘completely fallacious,’” Michael Hiltzik points out  for the Los Angeles Times.

“It’s a scam perpetrated by finance gurus like [Suze] Orman and banks such as, well, JPMorgan Chase, obscuring that ‘the real issue is the continuing hollowing out of the middle class,’ Olen writes. Instead, average consumers are prompted to blame themselves for indulging in trivial luxuries.”

Not that there weren’t some supporters of Chase’s premise that cutting corners on restaurants and Ubers is an easy way “for most young workers to keep a good deal more of their cash,” as Tiana Lowe proffers for the Washington Examiner.

“The vitriol of the backlash aside, Chase's critics miss that the tweet actually conveyed some of the best financial advice for young workers today, and it’s advice they generally need to hear,” Lowe writes.

Then she does the math: “A 26.8-ounce canister of Maxwell House Master Blend Ground Coffee sells on Amazon for $6.02 and makes 210 cups of coffee. 210 small cups of standard Starbucks coffee costs nearly $400, not including tax or tip. If you drink two cups of coffee a day, this means that you could save well over $1,000 per year making coffee at home rather than buying it.” 

But what about all that socialization that goes on at Starbucks? 

Any any rate, by the early afternoon Monday, Chase had gotten the message: “Our #MondayMotivation is to get better at #MondayMotivation tweets. Thanks for the feedback Twitter world,” it tweeted.