In our previous story we learned about Money. Neighborhood kids were trading with candy and paper notes.
Imagine you have traded some of your toys for candy. You also helped your friend with his chores and he paid you with more candy. Pretty soon you had enough candy to fill all of your pockets five times! You don't want to carry all of that candy with you everywhere you go so what do you do?
Lucky, a candy bank just opened at the end of the block and banks are very useful. You can go to the bank and say "I'd like to deposit all of my candy". You place your candy on the table and a bank worker counts out your candy to know how much you have.
"You have 100 pieces of candy" says the banker. We will keep them nice and safe here for you, but we need your name so we know who they belong to! What is your name?
"ok, you may come back to the bank at any time to get all or some of your candy, and we'll always keep track of how much you have here." says the banker.
Banks keep money for people so they don't have to hide it under their mattresses.
Banks keep their money in big vaults so everybody's money is safe. Sometimes they'll also let you keep other things in their vault. You can get a safety deposit box, which is a little box with a lock on it and they give you the only key. You can put whatever you want in the box and the bank will keep it safe for you. What would you put in your safety deposit box?
There are many different kinds of banks and they offer lots of other services like making loans. We'll learn about those in another story!