Yea, the Achilles Heel of contactless (or phone/NFC) in the USA is the uncertainty that it's supported and the terrible UX for failure cases. How many times have you had this happen?

Your groceries are all rung up and the POS terminal is waiting. You dig out your phone or contactless card and try to invoke the contactless payment system. Nothing's happening. You wave it around a little. Still nothing. Grocery cashier is looking at you like you're an idiot nerd, saying "That thing doesn't work. Just stick the card in the slot." Now I dig in my wallet looking for my chip card as the whole line behind me huffs about how much of a moron I am. Stick it in the POS terminal, and it waits... and waits... and waits... and finally, loudly proclaims BONK BONK BONK transaction approved. Everyone other than me is saying "Finally, we can move on".

Contrast that with mag swipe: Pull out the card. Swipe it (which takes 500ms). Done.

Coming from Canada: my last experience with the stripe, >3-4 years ago, was more like: pull out the card. Swipe it (it doesn't work), Swipe it (it doesn't work), Swipe it slowly (it doesn't work), wrap a garbage bag around it and Swipe it slowly (it doesn't work), Swipe it one last time -- hey, it works! Then, physically sign my name on some piece of paper with a gross pen they had lying around.

vs my last 100 contactless payments: pull out the card, tap. Almost instant happy beep.

I once actually got stuck at La Guardia because of the chip/stripe divide. I hadn't thought to get enough US cash out in advance, and all I had was my Canadian CC and Debit cards. I'd used nothing but the chip on the CC for > a year and didn't realize the magnetic stripe was completely worn off!

I tried several money-changers and ATMs there, and even called my bank -- no options at all. I finally found $5 CAD in my backpack and changed it to USD for bus fare, then caught a local bus to a nearby actual bank, where they were finally able to use my ID and the card number to authorize an advance. It was a heck of a day.

Some US chip-enabled ATMs still insist on reading the magstripe first, and then tell you to reinsert if the card tells it that it's a chip card. If the ATM doesn't swallow your card, you can often swipe ANY chip-enabled card and then insert your preferred card when it tells you to reinsert.

> ... wrap a garbage bag around it and Swipe it slowly (it doesn't work), ...

Garbage bag? You mean one of those paper thin plastic bags that many big cities in the USA have all but banned?

Does that actually help with the mag strip being read or was that a joke regarding the cards being complete garbage?

It's a real-world solution that is widely-known but not widely understood.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ycw61/e...

No idea if this explanation is legit, but I can anecdotally confirm that the trick has permitted a purchase in one case in my own direct experience.

The stripes used to be embedded in the plastic and much more durable. Now we get cruddy surface printed stripes that aren't a reliable backup.

Here in the UK everywhere accepts chip and contactless. It rarely fails, and when it does everyone assumes its the card reader rather than the card. It's common for people to claim they'll stop shopping in places where the card readers fail, which means there's an incentive for retailers to keep them well maintained.

Anecdotally, the machines fail quite often in cabs.

I've always suspected they don't, but the cab driver says it's not working so you pay cash that they don't to declare as income in order to minimize their tax liability. I have no real basis for this suspicion though, besides knowing that taxi drivers were notorious for tax dodging before card readers were common (like most cash-based businesses really).

FYI my understanding is that, in London at least, cabs aren't allowed to operated with a broken card reader; if that happens to you, tell them that you have no cash and either it will suddenly magically work or you'll get a free ride (this has happened to me).

When I ask to pay by card in the UK or Norway, it's 50/50 whether the driver claims the card machine is broken. If you say you don't have cash, they're like "oh, well, let's try just in case", and lo and behold, it works every time.

Same in restaurants. They hate it when you pay with your card. They love untaxed income and I don't blame them.

I dunno, I've had plenty of instances where swiping a card doesn't work. Sometimes I'd have to put a plastic bag around the card and _then_ swipe it.

I've had that too, but when that happens, it's obvious to others; they can see you swiping again and again. Failed NFC just looks like you're standing there.

> Failed NFC just looks like you're standing there.

Or worse...it feels like you're just standing there. God, I hate that!

Wrapping it in receipt paper works great too

Those exist, but they are somewhat rare overall. The chip does take a lot longer than it should in most cases (I'll give them 2 seconds - which is enough time to cross satellites in geosynchronous orbit, for land based internet connections 50ms is plenty of time).

I haven't had a failure in the last 5 years of using contactless payment(in Japan).

It can be done, and is being successfully done in many places.

All of my cards have the tap to pay symbol, so all I do is tap the card and it works pretty much every time. If it does not, then I insert it into the chip reader.

Since cards can have tap to pay, chip, and stripe all on the same card, I do not see the uncertainty in merchants supporting it to be an Achilles heel since you will have the card anyway. It might be an Achilles heel for Apple Pay/Google Pay, but not contactless/tap to pay in general.

I have run into terminals where if you do tap to pay and it fails, it won't accept the chip until the cashier re-runs the transaction. This has caused me to just not use tap to pay.

It’s not a problem with the tech — just a matter of time and adoption. Swipe cards used to be just as problematic back in the day. Many places didn’t accept them either, and then if they did, it took a lengthy dial-up connection to process. Sometimes it would fail and retry multiples times, and if it still didn’t work, the cashier would grab one of these out from under the counter: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41xAsDSTsXL...

Now those are slow. But hey, this is back in the time when people would write checks at the checkout.

It's astounding how slow the rollout is in the US. I'm 22 and in Australia and I have never used a magnetic strip card and have used the insert chip method less than 10 times. Not a single card machine does not support contactless and only weird edge cases like refunds require you to insert your card.

Don’t be surprised. The almighty dollar rules here. If they have to pay a dollar to upgrade the infrastructure to support contactless payments, they won’t do it until they absolutely have to. And even then, if there is a payment machine that doesn’t support contactless payments and it is 5 cents cheaper than one that does, they will go with the one that is cheaper. Multiply that by all the hundreds of thousands of different stores. There is a huge national retailer near me that recently replaced all of their sales terminals. I thought that finally I’d be able to use contactless payments. Nope. The new machines don’t accept contactless payments.

I live in US, use contactless everywhere, and never have this trouble. But I just look for the (standard?) design pattern that indicates contactless is enabled - either text on a screen saying ”… or tap”, or the row of 4 blue LEDs across the top of the reader.

I can hardly imagine configuring my everyday carry so that a payment card is more accessible than my phone.

The latter is like 20 times more frequently used, and I speak as someone who does not use it to pay (at least not directly). Very odd premise, to me.

How could NFC payment fail? Is payment terminal rotten?

The few times contactless has not worked you just put in the same card in the chip slot (why would it be two different cards?).

Besides, I don't see how your situation is an argument for mag swipe. Are you saying contactless fails more than mag swipes? Or that mag swipe is faster than contactless/chip? Absolutely not my experience in either way.

> why would it be two different cards?

For me contactless is my phone or watch.

Atleast you are not the person still writing a paper check.....

I switched to curb side pickup, I hope I never have to enter a grocery store again

> Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all

That's a shockingly high number. I'm in Canada, and I'd take a rough guess that maybe 1-2% of taps fail on first try. Most of the time it works on a second try -- and I actually think that usually happens when the POS system is slow and you tap too early.

And in cases where it really is just not working, the fallback is chip + PIN, which is 100% success rate. I'm sure there's cases where a card gets damaged and it wouldn't work, but it's not like the magnetic strip will survive that.

I don't think I've used the actual magnetic strip in at least a decade, except when I've been travelling in the US.

I am in the US and I have been using tap to pay for a few years now with consistent success. And as you wrote, if it does not, you just insert the chip. But that seems rare.

I've come across a few places that accept contactless, but specifically reject Google and Apple Pay, and until recently, none of my cards had contactless built in, so Google Pay was the only way to do contactless. But, I have a Samsung phone with MST, so I can fake a swipe. Amusingly, the terminals that won't do contactless Google Pay happily accept the same with the magnetic reader.

On your point about contact less being hit-or-miss, this very much goes away when you have a number of options for vendors to choose from on the market, with terminals being supplied mainly by banks who want the business. Both competition and a lack of desire to deal with merchants having issues with the payment system provided lead to increases in reliability.

The overseas market has been saturated with chips for 10-15 years, and contact less for 5+, probably notably more.

I have asked in several stores (in Denmark) where contactless doesn’t work, but the terminal has the required hardware - The merchant has to pay a fee to enable contactless. My auto mechanic bitched loudly about it, until I told him he wanted $200 for enabling “daytime running lights” in my rear lights, which is also just “flipping a bit”

I just now realised that's the meaning behind name Stripe (the payment processor)

Not just US. Take for example Germany, the largest country in EU and most places are cash-only. Although due to coronavirus adoption of different payment methods (apple pay, contactless, card, etc) has been increasing.

I'd actually be curious about the numbers/actual ratio. I can't think of a single chain of stores that takes cash only, which will make up a huge percentage. On the other hand, restaurants, food stalls, ... are hit and miss.

I can't remember the last time I went to a restaurant or bar that didn't have Card payment and NFC options here in Germany.

Food stalls I agree are more hit or miss.

That's different though. It's one thing to only support ancient tech for cashless payment and another to stay cash-only. I wouldn't call that backwards. It's just a choice.

What is wrong with cash? It is one of the most fail proof form of payment. Stripe fail, chip fail, NFC fail, internet connection fail, phone line fail. But cash work almost all the time.

In last year, I have bailed out quite a few people stuck in the checkout lines because whatever hi tech form of payment, they were using, didn’t work and had no cash.

I live in Norway, and cannot remember the last time my card wouldn't work - period. Not just with the reasons stated.

When I lived in the states and worked retail, your cash wouldn't be accepted at a lot of stores if the power was out (or if internet/phone lines caused the registers to fail). To complicate things, I worked in a pharmacy, so accepting cash for the medicine without it going through the system might have actually been illegal.

You have to remember to get it out of the ATM. I ran out of cash like a week or two ago and have been too lazy or forgetful to stop by an ATM to get it.

Not to mention to use an ATM you need a card already to begin with, might as well just pay with that card directly?

Notes get wet, rip, and fall out of pockets. Everything fails.

In Switzerland we have both. You can pay cash nearly everywhere, or contact less, or using our own transaction system 'twint' usually over the phone linked to any bank account (or even prepaid kinda like PayPal)

They just have a bit more experience with the government that has too much control over individuals. If cash is gone, govt has complete 100% control.

I've been in a retailer within the last two years that still used paper and and imprint machine to process credit cards.

I last had this happen 4 years ago at a pharmacy that was having network issues. But now I no longer have any cards with embossed letters so the imprinting fallback would not longer work for me. I supposed they could fill in the slip manually which seems equivalent to a card-not-present transaction but without the instant confirmation?

Can confirm; I had a slip filled in manually when the computer system was down and my card lacks embossing.