First Union was well-known for treating customers poorly. Management ran even that poor reputation into the ground, so they bought Wachovia for the name and reputation, ran that into the ground too. Wachovia was a very conservatively run, sound financial institution prior. They weren’t known as a bank for people just starting out, though. Better for people with substantial deposits.
When Wells Fargo took over Wachovia here, WF fired, transferred or early-retired most of the long-time tellers and advisors and replaced them with young, clueless kids. Oh, and there was an aggressive “diversity” initiative as well. There were so many complaints at the branch nearest us, people from regional HQ were brought in to clean up the mess. It’s much better now.