One of the perks, I suppose, of being a reporter is that you get lots of interesting emails to sift through during a typical day. The most recent of which recounted the results of a Viacom study which found, among other things, that Millennials would rather go to the dentist than the bank.

Well, OK. There’s a little more to it than that, which you can read here, but this dentist-bank dichotomy struck me as a little funny – maybe because I’ve seen the dentist way more than I’d care to admit in the past year – and so I thought I’d conduct a little informal poll among my friends using  what else?  social media.

I put out the call to my fellow twenty-somethings on Facebook: “Would you rather go to the dentist or the bank?”

And yeah, a few oddballs said they’d rather visit the dentist – the complimentary dental swag bag is too great a lure for some to resist – but the majority of my admittedly small sample size preferred the bank to a good old-fashioned tooth drilling.

The reasoning is pretty obvious (well, to me, anyway), but entertaining all the same:

“The odds of bad news are too high while going to the dentist.”

“Bank is better, nothing worse than dental drama.”

“Bank – the dentist will leave you with no money AND mouth pain. Plus, my bank has lollipops.”

“The bank! My dentist keeps giving me bad news and I am too young for that yet.”

“I like my dentist, but I wouldn’t choose to go there. And the bank usually involves a lot of waiting, but the reason is most likely depositing money, so I guess I’ll have to say bank.”

As to Viacom’s other findings, I suppose it’s possible a good chunk of my cohort believes they won’t need a bank in the future, but I’ve yet to actually meet any of these people. My guess is that most of my generation will still choose fairly traditional banking products (e.g. checking account, savings account) but will largely prefer to conduct their transactions on the web rather than in a branch.

And – again, this is based on my own personal conversations with friends – if anything poses a threat to a traditional bank’s Millennial market share, it’s probably not a tech start-up like Moven, but a more familiar foe: The credit union.

Millennials: We’re not that complicated, after all.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Bank or Dentist?

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 2 min
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