The year is 1912. Burns D. Caldwell, president of Wells Fargo, responds to the River City, Iowa city council’s investigation into Wells Fargo.
Good people of River City, I know some terrible things have come to light recently regarding the con man known as Professor Harold Hill, but let me make this clear: Wells Fargo did not engage in conning children out of music lessons.
We may be just a delivery company, but we love music. In fact, every time one of our wagons has the pleasure of delivering a box of maple sugar, or a grey mackinaw, or some grapefruit from Tampa to your fair city, it’s such an unrivaled pleasure, and not at all terrifying to our horses, to see the entire populace line the streets and sing together about our delivery wagon.
Now hypothetically, if someone were to run dozens of marching-band-related cons throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, should Wells Fargo pay to clean up the mess? Why, that’s absurd! Wells Fargo didn’t operate Mr. Hill’s con. We’re a delivery company, not con men! We just took the money he made running his con and delivered the necessary items for him to continue running his con. But we had no idea he was running a con! As far as we knew, Professor Hill was actively leading boys marching bands in thirty or more towns throughout the Midwest.
What people do with what we deliver is not our responsibility. Should we be responsible when someone from River City orders a bathtub and a crosscut saw and then gets hurt taking a nice relaxing saw bath? Of course not! So why is it any different when a music man like Mr. Hill orders massive quantities of marching band instruments and uniforms? How could we know what he was doing with them? The fact that every town to which we’ve delivered his order has soon after filed a police report about Mr. Hill is irrelevant. Wells Fargo is a delivery company, not a detective agency!
At its heart, Wells Fargo loves giving people stuff. We love it so much one day we might even give people stuff they didn’t even ask for. So when Mr. Hill approached me to make a deal for large, bi-monthly deliveries of marching band supplies, I was thrilled. All I could think about were the hundreds of children’s eyes lighting up when they saw their beautiful gold cornets and trumpets and trombones. You can’t put a price on that. I mean, we did, and Mr. Hill paid in cash before we began delivery, but I think you know what I mean. Wells Fargo is a delivery company, not a company that specializes in figurative language.
And if Wells Fargo had noticed that Mr. Hill was engaged in less-than-honorable dealings with the townsfolk, what would you have us do? Lock him up? We’re a delivery company, not a prison company!
Okay, yes, we did invest in a few prisons. But that’s just because they make us money. How those prisons make us money is of no concern to us. We look at a spreadsheet, see an investment with good returns, and then put our money into that investment. Is that so wrong? Isn’t that the American way? And if that investment turns out to be conning children out of music lessons, or locking up children in cages, or spilling a few hundred thousand gallons of oil, how is that our fault? Why should a company be responsible for the consequences of its investments?
We’re just a delivery company, not a good decisions company.