In TV and radio commercials for the Wachovia Check Card, the rambling voiceover eventually gets around to this incentive: when you use the card, Wachovia will move one dollar from your checking account to your Way2Save® savings account.

That’s what it says.

It doesn’t say they’ll give you a dollar. It says the bank will move one of your own dollars from one of your accounts to another one of your accounts. I may be dumb, but I think I could figure out how to do that myself, assuming I wanted to.

What’s the deal here? Sunroom therapy in Bellevue for stressed out bookkeepers? “Take one dollar from here and put it over there. Good. Tomorrow we’ll be working with pennies and nickels.”

Oddly, there is more to it than moving a customer’s dollar from one pocket to another but you have to work to find out what.
The real deal is that you can also transfer $100 a month from your checking account to your Way2Save account. And, for the first year, you earn 5% interest, then 2% in years two and three. With CD APRs around 1%, that ain’t hay. An average customer could put, say, $120 a month into the program for three years and, with compound interest, earn a few bucks.

Apparently unaware that it can be good idea to tell customers and prospects about actual benefits, Wachovia’s commercials merely offer to move a dollar from here to there every now and then. I’ve been a Wachovia customer for years and you’d think someone at the bank would drop me a note about Way2Save. But no! The reasons, I imagine, are that they have 0 direct marketers on staff and the ad agency brings a director’s chair for the client to the shoots.

In the meantime we are left to wonder if a Check Card is anything like a debit card or an ATM card. I’m assuming that, like wireless and cell phone, they’re the same thing.