To most people walking along Meacham Avenue in Elmont at this very moment, the huge mergers that have been announced over the past month and promise to transform the face of the financial services industry forever, are an evening news story that happened to somebody else.

After all, given the broad brush of the average nightly news broadcast, it's all been about corporate profits and executive salaries and synergy.

Or has it?

In the two-and-a-half weeks since Citicorp announced its intention to unite with the Travelers Group and Nationsbank said it would merge with the Bank America Corporation, a number of consumer advocacy groups have asserted that such consolidations could lead to higher costs for fewer services or worse, for poor and middle class consumers.

Others contend that being able to place all their financial assets under one umbrella ¬ one stop shopping, if you will ¬ will actually enhance the lives of consumers whose time in already taxed, by not one, but two or three jobs, their families, and a variety of other demands.

Who's to be believed?

Seeking to find an answer to that question, we turned to one of Long Island's leading economists, Dr. Irwin Kellner, the Weller Professor of Economics at Hofstra University.

"First of all, when these mergers occur ¬ and remember, the specific mergers we're talking about are far from being a fate accompli ¬ the average person on the street doesn't see or feel too much difference, other than a change of signage on their respective banks.

"Looked at it very broadly, even after these announced mergers, I think that competition is still as strong as ever for the consumer's dollar, whether it be a deposit dollar or a dollar he or she borrows, and I don't think, as some have predicted, that the average resident of Floral Park or Elmont or Westbury will see a significant decline in the number of bank branches in their community. The reason being that there are still lots of banks and other providers of financial services around."

Bolstering the professor's contention that branch offices of banks won't soon disappear are the following statistics available from the U.S. Commerce Department on the internet:

While the number of banking and savings and loan institutions has declined from 18,193 to 10,922 in the past decade ¬ largely thanks to the deregulation of the industry in the 1980s ¬ the actual number of bank branches spread throughout the United States has remained relatively stable, at around 83,000.

"So for the near term, this is certainly not a negative event," Dr. Kellner continued. "And to the extent that it represents a growing need within the banking business to be competitive, it might actually be a boon to the consumer, because it shows that the industry is more interested than ever in offering them the best products possible at the best possible prices."

According to the professor, the real wars in the financial industry aren't being fought among individual banks and other service providers, but between the banking industry and high tech companies.

"The biggest competition any bank faces is not another bank, but Microsoft and other technology companies," he asserted.

While proponents of the announced mergers have heralded an age of one-stop shopping, where the average consumer will be able to open a single bank statement and read a monthly update of all their bank accounts, retirement accounts, and investments in one document, the realty of the late 1990s is that the technology that Dr. Kellner referred to, the internet specifically, has already made one-stop shopping much less of a selling point than it used to be.

Even discount stock brokers like Charles Schwab, once the king of low commission stock trades, are feeling the pinch from online stock brokerage services, like Ameritrade and the E-Trade group, who cut out the human broker as middle man and undercut what had once been considered the most discounted prices possible.

And while the internet, in and of itself, is now a pervasive reality in the business world, bear in mind that even financial television programing has gotten in on the act. CNN-FN, for instance, which airs a half hour program on the giant cable network each weekday morning, advertises its own web site, where viewers can keep a constant watch on the stock and other markets and catch up on other finance-related information which is updated daily.

"While events like these big bank mergers grab the headlines, you have to realize that another revolution has taken place rather quietly; the result of that revolution has been that an increasing amount of financial transactions are taking place electronically, through ATM machines, personal computers and the like," Dr. Kellner said.

"These mergers, as big as they seem, will not change that and may, in fact, pale by comparison. It's this technology, by the way, that's actually inspiring these mergers, because you need size nowadays to be able to invest adequately in technology.

"Chase Manhattan, for instance, which was not involved in any of these mergers, invests $2 million a year in new technology."

Given these realities, Dr. Kellner said the average person living in Elmont shouldn't feel threatened by what appear to be sweeping changes in the financial industry.

"My advice to the average man or woman on the street would be, make every effort to be an educated consumer. Continue to look for the best products at the best price," he said.

"You know, there's been a lot of talk about one-stop shopping when it comes to financial products, but deals like the Citicorp-Travelers merger will only work if their products are the best in their respective fields, at a good price.

"It's like our old friend Sy Simms has always said, 'An educated consumer makes the best customer,'" Dr. Kellner continued. "As long as people are aware of the choices they still have, they shouldn't feel threatened. In fact, they should feel encouraged because the impetus to merge shows that the people in the financial services industry are feeling the need to compete for their dollar."