E.g. at Aldi here (Southern Germany) paying with card including entering the PIN isn't really slower than paying cash (and the Aldi cashiers are crazy fast in handling cash). At other stores the card terminals seem awfully slow, though.
I’ve been assuming this is some new, unoptimized codepath kludged into a legacy system because it’s very common but doesn’t seem to affect new products – e.g. Square systems are always a fraction of a second.
The one part I can’t explain is why at the subset of places which support both NFC and chips, the NFC transactions are at least as fast as magstripe when the chip transactions are so much slower.
I can imagine it being related to internet connection speed if it was a minor delay, but people seem to describe really significant delay, even in major US cities where you'd imagine that shouldn't be a problem.
Does anyone know why this is?
Chip cards have been widespread in Europe for over a decade (in some places they've been around over 20 years). As pleasantly convenient as the new tap cards are, I've never found chip to be slow as long as I can remember. Sometimes a wireless terminal will have momentary connection problems but this is rare enough to be acknowledged by the shop as a clear technical fault and apologies given for the delay.