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"