What country are you in? Every time I use the chip in the US, the terminal goes PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARD… PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARD… and it takes 10-15 seconds, which is like three times as long as it used to take with the swipe, and much much slower than the tapping.
More often than not, that’s because the merchant hasn’t enabled the chip reader, not because it’s broken.
In my experience, at my store, how long a charge takes is entirely dependent on the machine and the software on it. When we first got EMV, it took forever. In fact, it took forever, plus the amount of time doing it over again when people pulled their card out. A couple of software revision later and it’s gone from 30 seconds to maybe 5. On our other machine, the time from putting the card in the reader to signing/entering PIN is maybe almost instant to 2 or 3 seconds.
And with that, don’t forget when you swipe your card, it still takes time, you just aren’t as aware of it because that time isn’t spent with you anxiously waiting to pull your card out.
My newest AMEX is not even embossed, the card number, expiry, and my name are printed on. Nothing for a knuckle buster to pick up on a carbonless triplicate!
With those contact-less cards, would an RFID-blocking wallet be needed or desired?
Yeah, they really do. About a year ago, Kroger stop accepting Visa credit cards (not debit cards though) at a few of the chains under it’s umbrella. They did this because they felt the interchange fees (which are paid fees passed through the processor and collected by the banks/Visa) were too high. A lot of stores don’t take Amex, but stop taking Visa unless you plan to get something out of it.
Considering even my little store can call up my processor once or twice a year and get my rates lowered enough to save a hundred dollars a month or so, just imagine what those big places can negotiate.
As far as the liability shift, I’m not sure whatever became of that. I brought my machines into compliance before the original deadline, but then it kept getting pushed back as more and more businesses said ‘uh, what about…’ and it was clear they didn’t think this through.
I have friends that own places were they simply couldn’t afford to lay out $500-$1000 to upgrade or replace their equipment.
At the beginning, they very clearly didn’t think about tipping. Part of all this EMV, made a behind the scenes change where the merchant can no longer edit the amount of the charge. At a restaurant, when you write the amount you’d like to tip on your receipt, the server or manager or owner goes back in later and adjusts your total to your original bill+your tip. Can’t do that anymore. That means they have one of two options. Find some clunky way to get you the total so you can add in the tip before they swipe your card. Think about that at a bar. The bartender tells you your drink is $5 and ask they take your card, they ask how much you’d like to tip. OR, they have to find away to get the terminal or PIN pad to you, say they can enter the amount and let it present you with a prompt for adding a tip. In reality, that’s going to mean broken terminals/PIN pads as they get dropped or spilled on, or the bar upgrading to a wireless terminal/PIN pad.
Then there’s gas stations. Gas stations are one of the biggest drivers for pushing the deadline back over and over. It’s costing them an absolute fortune to upgrade. In some cases, they’re having to rip up concrete to lay new wires to each pump. In other cases, upgrading their equipment is turning into having to replace the pumps.
And the list goes on.
What bugs me is that we didn’t go full chip and pin. As you’d expect there was a lot of pushback against this. Hopefully someday we go full chip and pin, but I’m worried we’ll just have to go through all this again. It seems like that would make things that much better. I won’t go through all the pros and cons since other parts of the world use it, so they’re known, but anything has to be better than someone else being able to use my card (or a card with my number on it) simply because they can scribble on a receipt or the merchant doesn’t require a signature.
Despite any C&P security issues, if I had the option to make it so my cards would get declined without the correct PIN, I would.
We still have a knuckle buster for when something isn’t working with the regular machines. Anything from a power outage to the card networks being down. Luckily, the cashiers notice the non-embossed cards and just handwrite them.
Also, FWIW, many (most? all?) stores still have one of those hiding somewhere. The one we have is probably 30 years old. We’ve switched processors many, many times over all those years, so it’s not like our current one knows we have it, yet certain changes to our account will trigger them to send us replaced plates for it.
I wouldn’t bother. First, just to clarify, the chip (that gold part at the end) that you dip (actually the term) into the reader is not an RFID chip. I know you said contactless, which is correct for RFID, but it gets confused. RFID is embedded in the card and the one you wave near the machine. If you have RFID/NFC/Contactless, you’ll have a little wifi looking symbol on the card.
Most cards don’t use that. It’s a perk, not a requirement.
In either case, I’ll be surprised if they stick around for too long since people A)don’t even typically know they’re there and B)are skipping right over that to Apple/Android pay.
Wow. Lots of good info in this thread. I have the Square swiper with the right plug so it works with my iPhone, but I don’t want to leave my iPhone at the checkout just in case someone doesn’t have a card with a chip. I don’t have a store, I go into theaters and sell concessions for them, so I have to deal with all the money myself. It turns out I can buy a used iPad with WiFI, so I will use that with the swiper installed and the Square chip reader and not depend on my iPhone being close by. I don’t want to lose a sale because someone had an older card that is chipless…
When I’ve used the Square chip/swipe combo device, I often find that the chip takes forever to process. I’d rather swipe the card because it’s almost always instantaneous.
It amazes me how the US is so behind on all this. When we eat in a restaurant, the waiter brings a card reader to the table; like most people, I will not let my card out of my sight, and I prefer not to let anyone else handle it. I put the card in the slot and after a few seconds (10/20 maybe) the waiter gives me the machine so that I can check the screen and add a tip if I want to (some machines suggest a tip and I have to say yes/no). The remote terminal prints out a receipt and that’s it.
I never add a tip to the credit card transaction because some managements do not pass the full amount on to the staff; If the person who serves me gives good service, I prefer to tip them in cash. Of course, if the service is just ordinary, they get no tip.
Same here in Canada. For total amounts under $100 a tap is sufficient, otherwise chip & pin at the table. In my experience when the card has a chip, the mag stripe NEVER works. Not sure why it’s even there. If there are any POS systems not equipped for chip & PINs I’ve never seen any.
I think this is another difference between the US and UK. In the US, in my experience, leaving no tip doesn’t mean you thought the service was ordinary, it means you thought the service was absolutely abysmal, probably worth complaining to the management about. Ordinary service gets 15%. Very good service gets 20%. Exceptional service might get 25%. I can’t remember ever experiencing service so bad that I left no tip.
Same culture in Canada. Anything less than 15% is a major insult. Really good service deserves at least 20%. I confess that I tend to stick closer to 15% when wine is a major part of the bill, but I’ll cheerfully do 20% for a really lovely evening.
I still remember many years ago getting really crappy service at a New York City restaurant where we had lunch, just an ordinary walk-in-off-the-street type restaurant. The service was so crappy that we decided not to leave a tip at all, but in counting out the exact change for the bill I had accidentally left a penny on the table top. It was unintentional, but it could not have worked out better. The waiter, in a fury, assuming the penny was supposed to be symbolic of the worth of his tip, forcefully threw the penny at us as we were leaving, punctuated with loud profanities, which, needless to say, made quite an impression in the small restaurant. And reflected far more on him than it did on us.
Is it a member-only co-op? In which case they know who is making purchases & have their name/address in a database? If I were one to commit fraud, I’d be far less likely to commit fraud in a place that had my demographic info. That’s why I won’t use my personalized deposit slips as a ransom note when robbing a bank. 
Most of the pushback was from the issuing banks. If you forget your PIN then you use another card in your wallet, which then becomes your primary card earning your bank $0 in interchange income. The bank also needs additional call center staff to deal with all of the “I can’t use my card”/password resets. A lose-lose for them that was determined to be more than the cost of fraud losses.
We have those, it’s just that an established business, especially a small business, would prefer not to spend $700+ on it if they can avoid it.
An acquaintance of mine owns a restaurant. He adds 3% to the tip portion of the bill. That is, if your bill is $100 and you tip $20, instead of your total being $120, it’ll be $120.60. His reason being that he understands that he’s going to take the hit on the portion of the bill, but he doesn’t want to pay that fee on the tip since he’s not keeping any of it. He would essentially be giving money to the processor just to pass money from the customer to the waitstaff. Ethics aside, it makes sense and persuades more people to pay, at least the tip, in cash.
There’s a handful of reasons, but I think one of the bigger ones is just pushing back against change in general.
But, another example is the retraining. One of my credit card terminals gets small updates on a regular basis (it’s android based and everything (making a sale, loading a gift card etc) an app. Everytime something changes, even a little bit, I get a bunch of questions and have to go out there, figure out what changed, what’s different and explain it to everyone. Imagine a big place like Target having to retrain not just there’s hundred thousand-ish employees, but also customers that are used to it being a certain way. If they can avoid or delay that, they’re certainly going to.
Does he make this clear on the check? Because, if not, it’s fraud.
Yes, it’s printed right on the receipt that’s handed to the customer (where they have the option of adding on a top as well as, IIRC, on the menu. He’s 100% transparent about it, however, I added the phrase ‘ethics aside’ for a reason.
Having said that, I’d be interested to see how it would play out if a system were introduced where, after swiping your card, the associated fees would be added to your total (with full disclosure, no surprises) so the customer can foot that bill. Keep in mind, even if you pay cash, you’re still helping pay for all those credit card charges. This would accomplish two things: 1)stores would only have to pass the overhead fees (ie monthly fees, chargeback fees, equipment fees etc) to all the customers (credit and cash), which are almost negligible compared to the fees for actually running the cards and 2)it would encourage people to get cards that cost the merchant (or now them) less. There’s like a dozen different categories of credit cards that all cost us different amounts and no way for the merchant to know at the POS. Look at it this way: If you have card that gives you 1% back, but dings you 2.5%, would you rather have that, or the one with no rewards but only dings you 1%…or maybe you’re debit card that could be even less.
It may even help to reduce all those fees since instead of merchants trying to reduce them from time to time, it would be the cardholders, of where there’s a lot more, constantly complaining about them.
I’m not sure if such a system is even feasible but it’s something I think about from time to time.
In the UK, it’s illegal for merchants to add charges to cover the cost of a credit card; this is why Amex is rarely accepted these days. Of course, this means that those paying cash are subsidising those of us who use cards. It’s quite rare these days to find a business without a card reader and I recently saw a news report of a street busker with one: It may take a while to catch on though…
And those who pay with cards are subsidizing the people who pay with cash, who don’t pay any extra for the extra labor, the bank fees for withdrawing change, the counting errors, the cash that goes home in unscrupulous employees’ pockets, etc.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clear answer as to who is getting the better deal. The card industry says cash is more expensive, the cash industry says cards are more expensive, and both have figures to prove it.
this was a thing that people said when contactless credit cards started in the UK.
In fact, I’ve not even seen it discussed as a thing nowadays. The likelyhood of someone pottering around with an RFID reader, waving it at back pockets is not great.
In any case, why not just steal the card and spend it in £30 chunks (that’s the UK limit for contactless for Visa/MC)
It still is, at least on Amazon. I was looking for a new wallet the other day, and a sizable proportion of them (significantly more than half in whatever search I was doing) are RFID blocking. It seems to be becoming just a standard feature of wallets.