Businesses still use a ton of checks, too. Even if they have direct deposit for employees there's an absurdly good chance that they're paying all their vendors with a paper check. I still don't fully understand why this is still the case, other than there not really being a compelling reason to change a system that works fine.

Most American cards are chip and signature, not chip and pin. And they weren't even chip at all until recently.

"until recently" meaning several years ago? Availability of terminals and support for the chip was what lagged, not the cards themselves (though that's a semantic argument in this case).

I would also somewhat argue that "most" cards are chip and signature, not chip and PIN. While in the US my cards all prefer PIN, it wasn't until I got out of the US that for some reason they all wanted a signature - talk about irony.

It's still far from ideal and not nearly as rigid as it is in Europe, but it's not quite as bad as you seem to think it is.

Is this really a characteristic of the card, rather than the reader? After all, my cards have pins. And often neither a pin nor a signature is required, although the chip is read. And when I buy something online, obviously the chip is not read.

My parents still use personal checks everywhere they can. They are why many stores still post "no checks accepted" signs in 2018.

> And for several years, I've been living in an apartment which takes direct bank transfers for rent rather than paper checks.

Several years, huh?

Landlords have been the exception that demonstrates the rule, was my point.

Even landlords who are notoriously cheap and low-tech, are moving away. So called checking accounts don't give you a free checkbook any more, in my experience. I don't think I've had to wait for a person writing a check at the grocery store in the last 20 years.

I don't think some landlords requiring checks (in my case almost a decade ago) mean the USA hasn't moved away from paper checks in general.

People often generalize one group by the actions of a tiny fraction of its members, while comparing to another group characterized by the actions of the vast majority. It was particularly blatant here.