Why Sales Quotas Ruined Wells Fargo

Last year Wells Fargo & Co. got in a lot of trouble because its employees opened millions of fake accounts for customers to meet sales quotas. That was bad and illegal. Since then there have been a lot of stories about how terrible things were at Wells Fargo, though, and what is striking about them is that all of the emotional drama -- all of the gut-wrenching, obviously terrible moments -- center around the legal things that the bankers did to meet sales quotas. Nobody really gets that emotional about a fake bank account. For the employees, it just means typing some characters into a computer. For the customers, it means being mildly confused to find a checking account with two cents in it. It's a bland neutral (illegal) solution to a real problem. The real problem, for the Wells Fargo employees, was stuff like this:

That's from this Financial Times story about the difficulties faced by whistleblowers, and about Wells Fargo's high-pressure sales culture, which had branch bankers sneaking into Petco to try to get dog groomers to sign up for banking products. The Petco guy -- a Wells Fargo banker named Nvèr Hasratyan -- is the lead anecdote in the story. "He says the job felt like pushing nightclub invitations to strangers." But no one pays multimillion-dollar fines for pushing nightclub invitations to strangers. Congress wouldn't have held hearings if Wells Fargo had stuck to cruising Petcos for prospects. All of this stuff is fine, normal, legal sales practices. It is just kind of depressing.