I’m used to the dialup-style delays but these are longer and happen at places with new equipment and high transaction volume, and they seemed to be doing real-time transactions before because even the magstripe transactions would immediately trigger the push notification to my phone.

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.