rewards points!
By using a credit card I get use of my money for another 30-45 days, plus 1-4% back in cash benefits from the issuing bank.
This article in The Atlantic pretty much sums it up. As others have posted, card issuers feared that U.S. consumers would avoid using their cards if they had to input a PIN, so they chose to reduce the counterfeit-card risk (chip) but continue to endure the stolen-card risk (no PIN).
Yep, this. I have three debit cards and the only time I ever use them is to take money out of the ATM. (And there’s only one I use, as it pays me back any additional fees the bank charges up to a certain amount a month–looks like $15, but I so rarely take money out of the ATM that I’ve never come close to the limit to avoid fees.) Otherwise, it’s always credit cards for the above reasons, plus additional security in case of fraudulent use.
I remember doing that (40 some years ago). I had to call in to get authorization on a large purchase, from the back office. When I got to them, they said “No! Not authorized.” And asked about getting the card. When I told them I had it in my hand, they were very happy, and told me absolutely not to give it back to the customer, but to send it in to them with the paper charge slips.
About a month later, I got a reward check from the credit company for ‘retrieving’ that card. It was a big deal to me, because I remember the amount as being about the same as a days’ wages. Soon every clerk in the store was taking the card with them when they went into the back office to call in for an authorization check.
Just helped set one up for a non-profit organization last week. It was actually from Paypal, using their ‘Paypal Here’ service. (Their service integrates better with Paypal, and they charge a slightly lower percentage fee on transactions. But Paypal charges ($15) for the device, while Square is free to obtain.)
But the device itself was a little white thing that plugged into a cellphone or tablet, and everyone called it a ‘Square’ when using it. Worked really well, for credit cards or debit cards, even for ones without a mag stripe. Could even be used to process checks (though why we would do that, and have to give them a % of the money was unclear to me).
I think it means it’s processed through the US credit-card payments system, rather than through whatever they use for debit cards.
I read that Canadian debit cards cobranded with Visa or MC must be used for debit in Canada in person via Interac; you can only use them for debit in person via MC or Visa if you are outside Canada.
You can use them online for debit via MC or Visa inside Canada…
I’m with RBC. I didn’t get a cobranded Visa/Interac débit card. Instead, I got an additional ‘virtual’ Visa card with a different number, tied to my chequing account. It’s just a printed plastic card; there is no chip or stripe or even embossing. It can only be used online in situations where you type in credit card info. (I’ve never tried using it over the phone.)
(And the dirty little secret of Visa Debit is that not all places will take it even if they say they take Visa. Somehow they can tell the difference – the card number perhaps? But often, the purchase won’t say, “Sorry! That’s a Visa Debit card and we don’t take those.” Instead, it will just fail with an unhelpful error message that leaves you uncertain whether the payment went through or not. Royal Canadian Mint, I’m looking at you.)
Those are standard in Canada for
both debit and credit cards.
Budgeting. I’m just better at budgeting with cash and debit transactions. YMMV.
What a friggin’ quagmire.
In the last 25 years, or so, Canada has gotten rid of the one dollar bill, the two dollar bill, the penny, soon the $1,000 bill, and converted paper bills to polymer, and implemented world-class chip and PIN systems and wireless card readers everywhere.
WTF US?
So what do you do if something is less than $5? You have to pay for it all in coins? How in the world is that better?
WTF Canada?
You just tap your card. 
YES!
ETA: Or smart phone.
Use a $5, $10, $20 bill, and take the change in bills and coins. A couple of loonies in change lets me play the pinball game at the local sports bar. Or the loonies will buy my coffee tomorrow. Either way, I don’t have to pay for purchases that are less than $5 in coins, unless I want to.
As for the OP, it’s “the machine” here also. Even available in taxis. “Turn on your machine; I’ll need it when we get there, so I can pay you.”
I am so behind the times. :smack:
I’ve run into a few places that take tap for MC and Visa, but not Interac. Confusing, when it displays the tap logo but you can’t tap debit. Kind of undermines the whole point of tap, which is that it be used for the small transactions that would otherwise be coins.
As for the OP : in Québec, it’s “la machine” too.
Monday night we were at a restaurant, the waitress asked “Is everybody paying by card? OK, I’ll bring the machines.” . It was the end of a slow evening, so it was more efficient to bring both terminals to the table.
I absolutely don’t disagree overall but I will point out that we did get rid of the $1,000 bill half a century ago. (Technically it’s still legal tender, which I guess it won’t be in Canada, but legal tender doesn’t mean much in 2018 and they’re worth more to collectors than as money so they aren’t floating around in the mob or anything.)
It will work seamlessly. You don’t have the option in Canada because you have a law there that says it must use the interac payment networkif available. But here, the machine will treat it like a credit card with no issue.
If you say DEBIT, though, and they dont use the Nycee network, it’s not going to work.
The only problem you might face is if your bank suspects fraud due to the foreign transaction. Make sure your bank knows you are traveling so they turn off any restrictions that might be in place.
Mentioned here:
I think part of it, at least in Canada, is that the debit card evolved out of the client card given to customers by the banks, and had nothing to do with credit cards at all.
Originally you had to go to Your Branch of Your Bank to get money… or write a cheque on your account and hope the other person will accept it. (My aunt worked in the Bank of Montreal for thirty years starting in the late fifties, and was recently telling me about the “clearance room” upstairs at the main branch in Peterborough, where all the cheques written in town were sorted out and sent to their destination banks. That branch was the “clearing house” for Peterborough.)
When I was a kid, there was advertising about “Multi-Branch Banking”, where you could go to any branch of your bank and withdraw money, no cheque required. I think the client card appeared around this time as a kind of ID. But we still had our little bankbooks with a record of transactions.
The client card came into its own with the first ATMs. It had a magnetic stripe and allowed you to get money from your bank’s, and only your bank’s, ATMs. I remember this from when I was in university in 1981. We would open an account at the specific bank branch on campus so we could use its ATM in the Campus Centre.
Later in the eighties, the Interac network came along, interconnecting the ATMs of different banks. Now you could use your client card in any ATM. This “Shared Cash Dispensing” was Interac’s first product. (Later, the ability to use credit cards for cash advances in ATMs was added.)
In the early nineties, Interac started to roll out debit-card purchase at point of sale, using the client card as a debit card. This was a big deal and was rolled out province by province, west to east.
I remember this because I went west in 1994, and in Alberta I used my existing client card as a debit card, swiping it with the same PIN I used at ATMs. When I
I got back to Mississauga, I went into the bank branch at Square One and withdrew some money and updated my bankbook, and the teller asked what the strange new type of transaction was. I explained that I’d been out west and used my card at terminals at different merchants. It hadn’t reached Ontario yet. A while later debit terminals were rolled out nationwide.
Later, in the mid-2000’s we went to chip and PIN. I had a chip-and-PIN credit card by 2008, taking over from the older stripe-and-sign credit card. My debit card went chip-and-PIN somewhere around this time as well.
And the latest frill to come along, in the last five years, was contactless transactions. We never had contactless transactions before having chips in our cards. I read that some versions of contactless in the States were pre-chip and just repeated the data on the stripe across the contactless interface; I can understand why this might be less secure.