It really just depends on what you value most when it comes to "friendliness". If you value being able to just swipe your card or enter your details and be done with it, and not have to deal with 2FA prompts, remembering a PIN, digging in an app on your phone, or waiting for a code via SMS, then you might not mind the small price increases around the board to account for fraud.

Not saying that's the case for everyone, but you can't define "customer friendly" in a narrow way that conforms to your personal desires and assume that's that.

Also consider that if banks did have strong authentication around every purchase, there would be less of an incentive for banks or merchants to agree to roll over and eat the cost when there is fraud (and more ammunition for them against laws that require them to). No security/anti-fraud system is perfect, and something will always slip through; I wouldn't want to be a card holder stuck with a big bill because someone managed to clone/swap my SIM (for example) and make transactions using my card if I had no protection from that.

My local Costco still isn't set up to handle chip cards at the gas station. No Apple Pay, either. That's just silly.

Other countries had chip cards and contactless payments in widespread use a decade or more before the US even got support for them.

From what I can tell, most gas stations aren't set up for chip cards. I got gas last weekend at a Shell station in SF and was surprised to see the reader was chip-capable. Seems like it's still pretty rare. It's moderately insane that gas stations have been allowed to drag this out so much, considering that gas pump readers are a huge target for card skimmers.

(Then again, I guess a chip reader doesn't stop people from putting in a skimmer that just reads the card number as usual through the magstripe.)

The pump also had a pad for contactless payments, but I couldn't get it to work with either my phone or the NFC chip on my credit card. Maybe it only works with Shell's own card? Wasn't clear.

(And at the complete other end of the spectrum, I then went to top up my tire pressure, only to find that the air pump wanted quarters, and only quarters. Fortunately the attendant turned it on for me for free. I usually don't carry much cash around with me, and even more rarely have coins.)

> Then again, I guess a chip reader doesn't stop people from putting in a skimmer that just reads the card number as usual through the magstripe.

I'd imagine it would do though, as many chip readers only need you to insert your card far enough to read the chip, which isn't far enough to read the entire magnetic track and thus skim the track (am layman though)

Maybe US issuers were much better at on-line fraud detection and didn’t need the newer system?

Hoping someone from the industry can comment, but I was under the impression that US issuers were eventually forced into EMV, after dragging their heels, because the US became a prime market for cashing out mag stripe data from non-US issuers.

Not because they are better at fraud detection, but because US issuers levy much higher fees from their customers across the board and so can eat more fraud-related losses.

Yep. In US the interchange fee is more than 2% of the transaction. In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards. That's why in US they have those cash back options on credit cards, that are just not possible in Europe.

Consumers have been paying for merchant losses since before credit cards even existed. The price of shop lifting, robbery, burglary, ect... have always been factored into brick and mortar pricing (even if only via the cost of insurance). The cost of fraud is factored into online pricing. It’s not a problem that’s going to go away.

"It's not going away" is not a good reason not to mitigate.

2FA would also have higher costs for consumers, possibly much higher costs due to customer support staff and having to reset that second factor.