> Not at all. Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards).

Your ability to get a line of credit hinges upon an invasive scoring system that tallies your creditworthiness by a multi-billion dollar opaque bureaucracy.

When you go to buy something at the retail level, you're watched by dozens of cameras that record you from the second you drive into the parking lot. When you go to use those credit cards, cameras from every angle imaginable are in your face, and sometimes literally right in front of your face, so there is no ambiguity about who is making purchases and what payment methods they're using. One purpose these cameras serve is to collect evidence in case a customer should open a dispute with their creditor or do a charge back, and another is to collect evidence for criminal charges and prosecution. Retailers will share the video and other data they collect on "problem customers" with other retailers to use as they please. Also, if you use cash and pay with bills above $20, they'll either be denied or checked for forgery.

I've also shopped at retailers where I didn't fit the image of their ideal customers, and have been followed around by employees and owners. You don't feel much trust in that type of situation.

Forget credit cards, the U. S. is a place where you can scrawl your name and a monetary amount on a piece of paper and people will accept it as if it is cash. If that isn't "high trust", I don't know what is.

(Granted, these days that piece of paper gets run through Telecheck or whatever, so the risk has gone way down that last few decades.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe anyone has accepted significant funds like that in a very long time unless it was for some invoice; that is to say you already owed the money.

>Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards).

That's not how credit cards work. At all.

>You order food for pickup, and the great majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did in fact order what you're taking

I have literally never seen this once in my life. Where do you live where the "great majority" of restaurants operate this way?

>>Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards).

>That's not how credit cards work. At all.

Not the OP, but that's exactly how cards work. When a card is swiped the seller doesn't receive the funds until possibly days later. There is absolutely no guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money, since it can be disputed or charged-back.

In retail, the actual risk of not receiving money for a credit card transaction is pretty low. In the case of a stolen credit card, the retailer is not responsible for the fraud and will be paid. Outside of some sort of mistake (or outright fraud) on the part of the retailer that they refuse to correct, the fact that the credit card was physically present resolves pretty much everything else.

The actual risk of a merchant not receiving money for a credit card transaction is quite high. Chargebacks are enough of a business problem that many large retailers have whole teams only devoted to processing and disputing them. There are entire companies that create products and services to help merchants reduce just "friendly fraud" chargebacks—that is, chargebacks where the cardholder says the purchase wasn't authorized but they are just lying or it was a family member who made the purchase. That there are entire industries devoted to helping reduce it shows that the risk of chargebacks is definitely something that merchants take into account in how they run their businesses.

In case of a stolen credit card, it's 100% the merchant who pays (that's why they're called charge-"backs"). The only exceptions are if the transactions are indemnified by a third party partner.

All the card brands have multiple chargeback codes for fraudulent transactions, even card-present ones, so the fact that the credit card was physically present is not some kind of guarantee that the merchant would win a chargeback representment.

In the US maybe. I have never in our business seen anything like a chargeback or heard of anyone ever doing something like it. It is a very American problem. Even if people did do so they would be punished quickly. It is only a problem in a society with a high level of crime and little or no consequences. The law allows a chargeback for 12 months here. Not a problem, not even in our webshop.

> It is a very American problem

This is laughable, as North America has the lowest chargeback rate of all the global regions. This is just biased and ignorant anecdata.

> It is only a problem in a society with a high level of crime and little or no consequences.

If you're going to make nasty anti-American claims, you should at least back it up with real data. The facts are that chargebacks are a bigger source of fraud loss outside of North America than inside it.

> Even if people did do so they would be punished quickly.

This is not how credit card fraud works.

Yes. I didn't say that the risk is incredibly high. If it were, cards would not be used. The point was that payment is not guaranteed, since chargebacks are allowed.

The risk is 0.001%, and it brings in 30% (or whatever) more business. This has nothing to do with trust, it's a simple equation.

You're comparing apples and oranges. This is not a risk, revenue, or trust discussion. The discussion was that credit card payments are not guaranteed due to chargebacks. This is a truism and has nothing to do with the percentatge of chargebacks that occur.

This is exactly correct, and the parent's suggestion that the risk of chargebacks is something like 0.001% is WAAAAY off. Like, by orders of magnitude off. Any business that processes credit card transactions at scale, card present or card not present, is going to have a whole department of people who all they do all day long is deal with chargebacks.

It does seem like there are some people here who think they know how credit cards work but actually have no idea.

Not all businesses that use credit cards are in the broken US system. It's not a widespread problem everywhere.

According to Merchant Risk Council survey data[1], in 2021, friendly fraud in Europe was 1.3% (of transactions), 1.6% in Latin America, and 1.5% in APAC. In North America it was only 1.0%. So, it's actually a smaller problem in the US than in Europe and other global markets.

Further, "Annual Ecommerce Revenue Spent to Manage Payment Fraud" was 9% in Europe, 12% in Latin America, and 15% in APAC. It was only 5% in North America.

[1]: https://merchantriskcouncil.org/resource-center/surveys/2021...

Chipotle and Starbucks do it with online orders. However, they do that because they are big enough corporations to replace anything wrongly taken for free.

This really varies a lot with where you live. I'm almost an hour out of philly, very solidly middle-class office-y medical/pharma area and yeah, the sushi place I go to (not a chain, local place) just lays out the stuff on the counter for pickup, and you just look at the attached receipt since you actually what _you_ ordered. This would of course be ludicrous to do in some parts of the city itself.

the US is a low personal trust, high systems trust society. there are plenty of facilities to accommodate personal failures, in the case of defaults, insolvencies, missed payment, breached contracts there is a highly developed legal system to accommodate arms-length remediation and for smaller issues, claims courts and arbitration. in finance industry, in the wholesale industry, there are self governing organizations to manage clearing, settlements, margining, penalties and incentives to perform regular and continuous contractual obligations, etc various checks and measures to avoid failures but also stopgaps to remediate failures when they happen.

we don't need personal trust because there is systems trust.

japan is a high personal trust system that obviates the need for high systems trust. insolvency proceedings in japan for example rely on private proceedings, social and familial relationships, instead of formal remediation. without the need for high systems trust, there is a virtually non-existent (high-yield) credit market, because companies don't "fail" in japan in the way we traditionally think of credit failures, and the outcomes of a credit event is non-standard and very difficult to predict. furthermore, if you are an outsider to the personal trust system, it is very difficult to fully participate in society.

Honestly, as I've now lived in 9 different cities all across the US, what I've learned is that the US is wildly heterogeneous and generalizations about it are therefore rarely useful or resonant.

This is _strongly_ dependent on location. One could probably infer many attributes of a zip code to reasonable accuracy based only on how far the Starbucks in the area place pickup orders from the entry door.

All that stuff is not done out of trust but because it’s cheaper for them to not verify things. Amazon doesn’t make returns easy because they trust you but because they have run the numbers.