Their POS software was obviously written by competent people who care about what they're doing. Not by clowns laid off by Barnum & Bailey.

Edit: I did a few minutes of reflection about this, since it's an astonishing claim compared to standard practices. But what's probably happening has to do with membership. A checkout begins with the POS system scanning a membership card. So the system already knows exactly who they are dealing with. Then the chip read can probably do less in terms of the transaction; perhaps the transaction is automatically approved once an initial chip read verifies that the card is present.

Just to be clear, this is using a standard Visa EMV credit card, not a Costco affiliated card.