Observations of a couple of nonsensical banking phenomena

[Sidewinder]

A)

 

I mailed an payment to Sioux Falls from Hanalei, Hawaii on Friday, January 17.  That's obviously the earliest it could've left for Lihue; I've no clue if it was to go str8 to the mainland from Lihue (which means landing on the West Coast and nowhere else) or if it goes through Honolulu whence it could go direct to Chi-town but I'm thinking would add more time (at least more sorting time) to the journey.

 

The receiving bank reported having received the payment on Monday, which is bizarre not just because how could it not have taken longer to get to a not-so-major metropolitan area like Sioux Falls from a severely not-at-all metropolitan area like Hanalei, and furthermore how is the bank aware of this payment on Monday the 20th WHICH WAS A FEDERAL HOLIDAY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.  How could the postal service have delivered it (unless it got delivered on Saturday but that's even more insane), and how could the bank or their remittance processor doing that work on an federal holiday.

 

2)

 

As an BofA customer, I am eligible for all of these scrumptious "BankAmerideals" (I mean where else on earth would I score gold like 3% cash back on your $11 order at A&W) and one of these deals is for 10% cash back from Jamba Juice.  I was at the Jamba Juice in Lihue last night and not fully five seconds after my payment went through, I got a notification from my BofA app that "we are processing your cash back deal for Jamba Juice." 

 

As someone who worked in overnight mainframe batch processing for an gigantic bank, I have to ask, why would they expend computing resources sending out notifications like this in real time?  Who exactly is clamoring second-by-second for information on the whereabouts of their $1.20 in cash back, that they would require basically GDS-like database management with regard to piddling little notifications like this?  Surely BankAmerideals has fine print saying "please allow x days for processing" and even then the official Notification that they are processing the deal could be sent out after one or two overnight - maybe even weekly - batch cycles?

 

It's no skin off of my nose to receive the notifications as promptly as that, I am just trying to understand what sense there is in allocating computing resources like that. (This Jamba Juice one wasn't a fluke, either; same thing happened when I went to Shake Shack about a month ago.  : /  )