No one can find safe-deposit boxes anymore
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Good luck getting a safe-deposit box. Longtime deposit-box renters are getting kicked out of their boxes by banks that are shutting down or scaling back the service.
Customers say they have been struggling to find the small boxes traditionally kept inside vaults to store family heirlooms and other valuables. Kris Wall called 13 branches around the San Francisco Bay Area over the past 18 months, and visited another six or seven, in her unsuccessful search for new boxes. The 49-year-old gemologist and jeweler uses them to store her work, but was told to vacate her extra-large box at a First Republic branch last year.
A decade ago, she got on a wait list at one bank that said it expected an opening in nine years. It never called. She recently learned the bank got rid of deposit boxes completely.
“It’s literally going the way of landlines," Wall says. To some banks, the boxes are becoming more trouble than they are worth. Banks say the service is an anachronism in a time when people increasingly manage their checking accounts and investments on apps and websites.
There are more convenient options to store valuables: A search for home safes on Amazon yields hundreds of results. Home security has gotten more advanced and burglaries have trended down over the past two decades. Yet safe-deposit box customers—who tend to be affluent and middle-aged or older—see them as a bread-and-butter bank service.
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