As far as I'm concerned, chip cards can get stuffed. They're utter shit in my experience.
I don't think I am. All I do is take it out of my wallet, put in the reader, take it out, put it back in my wallet, lather, rinse, repeat.
or your local merchants use "special" terminals
That would make sense if we were talking about one merchant, or even just two. But I can go to Barnes & Noble, Lowes, Food Lion, the local corner gas station, Ace Hardware, it doesn't matter, I routinely find the chip readers less reliable than the magstripe reader. I can't explain it, but chips are tainted in my worldview at this point.
Here in the UK, many (most?) new payment terminals don't have mag-stripe readers at all. And I expect banks will start issuing new cards without a magnetic strip in the near future, if they haven't done so already.
I agree that chip & pin isn't ideal, not just because of reliability issues but also because of the security risk of PIN disclosure. But thankfully contactless (incl. Apple Pay/Android Pay) has already replaced it for 99% of daily transactions.
But if your card's chip is broken, can't you just get your bank to send out a new one?
Of course I can. But that means I have to stop and take time out of my day to call my bank and dick around with them. And then if the new card comes with a new number (I don't know if it will or not), and/or expiration date (that almost certainly will change), then I have to login to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the places online where I use that card for some kind of automatic payment and change the payment details. I'm extremely loathe to do that, because it's incredibly tedious and painful, and I always miss one anyway and wind up getting scary emails about how my account is about to be closed.
Sure, my hand will probably be forced on this sooner or later. But as it stands, I just haven't cared enough to deal with all of that.
Your new card will have a new number and expiry date, but the old one will remain valid.
In any case, these days my web browser remembers card numbers and fills them in automatically, so it’s really not such a big deal to update card numbers online.
That's a good point. I guess I should call them and see if that's an option. If so, that sounds like the best of both worlds.
I could also buy a phone that has NFC / tap to pay support, and link my card to Google Wallet and use that. An awful lot of the place I shop support that these days...
Here's an example image from a NY Times story about chips wearing down:
https://i.imgur.com/XlKEBsc.jpg
The last card I replaced due to chip wear, the chip looked even worse than that.
Not that they're even used that often these days either: everything is just tap-and-go NFC payment now.
And I do mean everything!
I've had the chip struggle like once in my life. That was on a card very near it's expiration date. Most people I see in the store have no problems with their payment method, and when I was a cashier in 2012, people seemed to have significantly more problems getting their magstripes to scan.
All of this is SUPER dependent on which flavor/brand of POS is popular around you, the effort your bank put into making a good implementation, and whether your local merchants actually put effort into running their business and keeping equipment maintained. Pretty much nothing in this discussion is generalizeable to all of the US other than "We were late to the party of chip cards"
I’ve had no problems with their readers since I started doing that.
This explains a lot.
Don't people have wireless terminals in the US like the rest of the world?
Sorry you can’t buy lunch, but the hold will get released in a few days, so it’s ok!
There’s got to be a better way…
I've bought gas in France with a Monzo card and the pump was able to hold and release money immediately - ~150EUR hold initially, as soon as I put the pump down it adjusted to the real amount.
Seems like the tech to make this happen does exist, it's just a matter of not using a shitty bank.
I understand why Germany, a poorer country which was late to electronic payments, wouldn't do this; I don't understand the hostility to it. But then, I'm American, we've been doing this longer than you've been alive.
You mean payments between banks that take two to three days within the country instead of a regulated maximum of 15 seconds across borders?
It's a shame you're so salty that the rest of the world has far overtaken the US. You may have been doing it "longer", but you've absolutely failed to iterate and are still stuck with obsolete technology that's rife with fraud, for which a more appropriate feeling than saltiness is shame.
But having a clunky thing at home you stick your debit card in is okay too! I guess.
What a security nightmare.
I really haven't heard of much trouble caused by these systems - of course, they require magnetic stripes in general, which are a massive attack vector, but the bar use case specifically doesn't seem to cause additional issues that I'm aware of. There are so many lower-tech and easy ways to steal magnetic track data, like skimmers, that I don't think compromising bar-back point of sale systems is a particularly high priority for most criminals.
Anyway, this is probably just a small snapshot in time regardless, since once swiped-card transactions finally go away US bars will have to switch to the mobile terminal pay-as-you-go method anyway.
Now you get it.
LOL. It's convenient for bar owners. Patrons doesn't give a shit about that.
Some establishments take your card as collateral, some actually swipe it into their system to keep track, but that's not that common.
???
Yes you can. At least the bars around me have no problem with holding a tab with chip and/or tap. Maybe they just use newer terminals.
I don't remember when I last saw a person not taping with phone or watch.