Not really a fan of the chip because it seems like the transaction process is longer. I like the days when you just swipe and the receipt comes out and you were done.
It is hard for me to recall whether the swipe and sign was faster or slower, but my impression was that it was slower. The chip and pin seems really fast in most places. It is especially nice in restaurants where the waiter brings a hand held machine, fills in the amount, then gives you the machine to insert your card. You are asked to verify, then tip Y/N; assuming Y, $ or %; choose %, say; amount; 18, confirm total, enter PIN, wait 3-5 seconds, then approved; machine prints out two receipts, one for me, one for the waiter. One thing I really appreciate about it is that the waiter never touches your card. At the grocery it is even easier, since there is no tip. Verify amount and tap in PIN. Wait a few seconds, then finished.
Does anyone remember the days that each CC transaction required that the cashier first consult a list of bad cards, then dial up the bank and get a confirmation to write on the bill?
Yes. And the first machines gave a confirmation code to write on the slip, like “A4F567”.
A friend of mine lost $600 on a sale. His employee accepted a card and wrote the confirmation as, “DECLINE”.
Thanks. My AmEx card, which I use for everything I possibly can, has accumulated enough Delta frequent-flyer miles to take me to Japan for free several times now; you cash users are subsidizing that benefit for me. 
Are you outside the US perchance? I haven’t had a restaurant here in the US do this yet. (And my chip credit cards don’t have PINs associated with them, either. None of my chip transactions have been chip & PIN.)
Yes, Hari posts from Montreal. And the point he makes is one of the security features of the chip: it used to be that the waiter took your card away and ran it through the machine, which was one of the ways to use a skimmer to get the card data, out of sight of the card-holder.
Now, the card never leaves our possession, so the opportunity for skimming is greatly reduced.
Yeah, I’ve seen the chip and PIN at the table thing with restaurants in Europe ages ago (must have been like 7 years ago or something. We’re way behind on this thing.) I haven’t seen it in the US yet. Like I said, I don’t even have a PIN assigned to my chip card, as far as I know.
My recollection is that we got the Chip cards in Canada around 2006.
I don’t recall ever hearing anyone griping that the chip readers took longer than the swipe ones; must be the “rush-rush” of American life. 
I assume yours aren’t actually slow. Like I said, there are some that I’ve encountered that work comparable to credit card swipes (like 2-3 seconds); the vast majority I’ve come across are in the 10-20 second range. I mean, to me it feels like half a minute, but I’m adjusting downward, assuming my perceptions are somewhat exaggerated. It’s quite noticeable, as in the amount of time it would take me to write out a check (which is something usually regarded as “slow” here.)
This cite claims an average of 12-15 seconds for chip card transactions in 2015. Apparently, there is some kind of technology called “Quick Chip” that Mastercard has that gets it down to 2.5 seconds, which is what I would say is the same as the speed of a swipe transaction.
USA Today claims that it’s 13-15 seconds on average, but that swipe transactions are only about 7 seconds faster. So maybe not as much as difference as I perceive, but it really does feel like it takes ages longer.
At least in the initial roll-out in the businesses I frequent that use them, US chip card readers were much slower than the equivalent in Canada. They have gotten better recently, but not yet as fast as the ones north of the border.
I can only imagine that the back end was horribly under-provisioned at roll-out, but that is a guess at this point.
I wonder if it wasn’t so much that it was under-provisioned as much as the credit card processors didn’t expect people to be so upset with the extra transaction time and so upset with the new way tipping/adjusting worked (requiring customer input during the transaction, no going back later) that they would actually ditch their machines that they just bought and bring their old ones out of storage and/or roll back their software even with the looming threat of the liability shift. And not just the merchants, there’s such a public outcry. Bad word for it, I guess, public annoyance?
Perhaps it’s been all these things together that forced the processors to get their acts together and find some ways to shave some time off the transactions.
Swiping would allow me to put my card back in my wallet and my wallet back into my pocket immediately. The insertion system requires me to pause there with my wallet open for a noticeable period of time. And of course since I don’t bear the cost of fraud (except quite indirectly), I don’t benefit from the added inconvenience.
This is a big concern of mine. This is especially a problem for people with limited mobility, e.g., can only use one hand well. Having to put down their wallet while paying is a security issue. Having to leave it there even longer than just a swipe makes it worse.
A lot, I mean a lot, of computer related interfaces are really horrible for anyone who isn’t in top form. Various disabled persons protection laws are ignored in such situations simply because … computers.
I’m not sure if this is easier or harder for people like ftg, but if you’re concerned about forgetting to put your card back in your wallet because you have to leave it in the reader, look into Samsung or Apple Pay.
I can’t speak for the iPhone, but for my Samsung, it just sits quietly at the bottom of the phone and (even in lock mode with my settings), I can pull it up, unlock my credit card with my fingerprint, hold my phone over the reader, it beeps, and I put it back in my pocket. Unlike using a chipped credit card, there’s no leaving it out. With some practice, it takes me about as long to do that as it does to read a short text. At big box stores (think Target), I can scan it while they’re still ringing everything up.
Also, as I (and Kayaker(?)) mentioned earlier with the Samsung Galaxy S7, this also works with nearly every terminal since the phone has built in hardware to emulate the magstripe on a physical credit card.
It’s amazing to me that they wouldn’t expect people to be annoyed. They took a system that has worked smoothly for around two decades and that had become very standardized, and made it different in every store, unreliable, more time consuming, and much more cumbersome. Most stores are not that unique, if one lunch place makes it take 3 minutes longer (10% of a 30 minute lunch break) to get through the line then I’ll probably just go to another one. And I think a lot of people worry more about the risk of robbery when leaving their wallet sitting out to fiddle with a finicky, slow reader which the credit card company won’t cover than the risk of having to call and dispute an unauthorized transaction.
Yeah, online there’s a set of people who really want better credit card security for some reason I’ve never understood, but most people just want to finish their transaction quickly and easily and move on with their life. The fact that none of the credit card companies seemed to realize this even though convenience is a major selling point of cards just astounds me.
I’ve encountered all of the same hassles and issues being discussed here. It’s really stupid how screwed up the implementation of chip and pin/signature is. But this morning I happened to need to pay for something in a local gas station and it went like this:
insert card
shown total, press okay
remove card
sign receipt
And the processing time for the reader was about 5 seconds. That’s the FIRST time I’ve seen one work that easily! In a gas station of all places…
Wow, no shit! The gas station near my house has the slowest POS POS system I’ve encountered. And they just upgraded to a new system a month or two ago! Which is about twice as slow as the old one.
The other thing–in some/many of the credit card swipers, at least at the supermarket, you can swipe your card after your first item is scanned, not have to wait to the very end of the transaction. (It varies by system, but all the ones at the grocery stores I use have them set up in this way.) I assume the way the system works, there’s no option for that with chip cards? I guess it’s not a huge time savings, but I like not having to fumble around with my wallet at the end of the transaction. Yeah, I know, first world problems.
It’s a very easy reason to understand – they want better credit card security because they are liable for fraud. Normally credit card end-users aren’t liable for fraud, so they can be concerned only with ease of use. Credit card issuers have different priorities.
Customers weren’t liable for fraud before, and they aren’t now. Sure, that’s the merchant’s motivation. But it was quite foolish of them to assume all their customers were chomping at the bit to have longer, more complicated checkout procedures with zero upside.