Chip and pin definitely would definitely be too slow for this. The barriers have to be fast enough to process huge numbers of people at peak times.
Contactless has eliminated all the usual queuing for tickets and/or prepay card topups - except for tourists.
However, customers hated it because it felt like it took longer. They would be done with their transaction, done paying, then have to way 10-20 seconds for their receipt to finish printing. So they'd be standing there just waiting to leave with nothing to do. The company had us change it back to printing each line as it was entered into the computer.
But the modern thermal receipt printers are pretty fast (the old dot-matrix ones weren't). Epson has one that does 350 mm/sec (13.75 inches per second). So as long as you aren't shopping at CVS with their infamously long receipts, it's not too long of a wait.
This is a sign of their incompetence. Period
The whole rest of the world uses this without a problem.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/13/474135422/episo...
Per parent, this could also be an internet issue. If the POS is processing with a delay, the employee has little control and blaming "incompetence" is ludicrous.
Having first hand experience with dealing with impatient customers because the POS is running slow creates a feeling of entitlement (on the person pointing out how incompetent someone is) and resentment (on the side of the affected employee who is helpless in the situation).
A one-off internet issue is fine. But in this case it seems that there is something systematically broken.
After readying your comment, I went through at least 5 different emotions.
I work in the QSR space and deal with the IT side. The idea that IT department can control the speed of the computer/internet/etc. is shared by both, staff and guests. Regardless if that's the case, your comment, in addition to the parent comment are fascinating.
It seems that regardless of the situation, someone has to take the fault and customers will just blame someone regardless. That's totally appropriate (even if its not, doesn't really matter as this is a perception > reality).
Just for that insight, I would up vote your comment twice, if I could.
Not really true. The rest of the world has had it and moved on, and this is a main reason why.
In my country at least, we're now on to tap-to-pay credit and debit cards in recent years, which is faster than the old school swipe and sign and much faster than the chip.
1. cashier done scanning items 2. person swipes card since reader has a slot to do that on the right side and that's what they usually do 3. machine beeps or displays an error or does nothing 4. cashier has to explain to insert the card 5. person fumbles with card, eventually getting it into slot 6. sometimes people just push it in and pull it out or otherwise don't leave it in long enough since every single POS has a different workflow and dialogue for this, and this error condition requires re-starting the process (GOTO 3) 7. Waiting 3-10+ seconds 8. Sign 9. Hit yes or accept or I agree 10. Wait another few seconds 11. Remove or forget card. Sometimes the machine beeps, sometimes not 12. Done!
Despite all this hassle, we still didn't get chip and pin that I had been complaining about for years, so if someone steals your physical card, they can still use it until you realize. I'm not really sure how this whole process improves security (does the actual CC number no longer enter the POS at any point?) but consumers here are definitely having some growing pains with the new system and the current state of supporting both old and new systems.
Whose incompetence? The cinema? They bought a turn-key, off-the-shelf POS package from a vendor. How much control do you think they have over that system? Card processing starts taking a dump, and you would suggest that the minimum-wage cinema worker running the cards do...?
Though your post makes me wonder: do payment providers have SLAs, or do they just say, "you're locked in with our network and hardware, suck it up"?
My anecdotal experience has shown this to be an extreme pain in some cases for both consumers and retailers. Any sort of business with frequent CC payments and high volume sees their POS wait time explode.
Two personal examples:
Attended a cinema, where they had to delay the movie time due to long CC processing times. Bought food at a takeout place, with clear signs instructions (to avoid) and apologies for the delays caused by chip readers.