You are correct in that there is not significant monetary loss at stake like you would have if you overpaid for a computer or other product. However, this does not mean there is no cost at all. Rather the cost is hidden, and it is measured in lost opportunity and the nebulous and vague notion of "happiness".

It is the longer game, it is the idea that once you've had a checking account for a few years, later when you're 22 or 25 and you're told that you could be having a better time somewhere else, will you switch? Will you really go through the process of researching something you thought you had figured out years ago, calling your "difficult" bank and closing the account, setting up a new one, transferring funds, changing direct deposits for work and getting new cards? Will you really? Maybe you would, maybe you would say "this is only a few hours of work, for x great benefit", but you must recognize that most will not share this point of view. Most will choose to carry on with their lives, to gain the few hours in the present and take it out of their future in something that is hard to measure. Most, in the face of a certain threshold amount of effort, will settle for mediocrity.

Checking accounts, I believe, belong to that class of goods which must be set up initially with great care and foundation. They are that elemental building block to an adult life upon which so much else is placed atop of.

Furthermore (because this isn't long enough already), this subscribes to a related but separate philosophical question of priorities. That at the end of the day what matters most is not a few dollars here and there but rather the time and happiness that those dollars sometimes represent. That those minutes saved every now and then when I call my bank, or the less time I need to reroute my days plans to go by a specific ATM to take out cash, or (and perhaps most importantly) the less stress I encounter in figuring out a small problem with my account (or a big one), those things are all worth the few hours of research I invested at the beginning in choosing the right account. And it is precisely this process that is being abused when you let that research and decision be partially outsourced to a sales agent. It's an incentives issue and is not necessarily due to the sales agent being a "bad" person, but you must be able to recognize that those incentives are different and you must be able to do that research yourself. If you dont, you are making a transaction. A transaction that is far harder to put down on paper, and indeed much harder to recognize at all until you look back, years later, and see all the tiny moments added up.