A politically heated examples: if you go to the farthest village of Russia, where only poor people live(for example 12h drive from Irkutsk), you will be able to pay with contactless payments in their local store(before the war, you would be able to pay with Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google/etc).

And in China you will be able to pay with qr codes based payments even to a homeless entrepreneur on the street, that tries to sell you selfmade slippers, or something like that.

I believe the point is that this change feels much more of a small increment elsewhere, because we've had modern payment systems for a while. NFC appeared in our cards without any significant change, because we had chip cards for decades before that.

> and my german bank only got a card available in wallet in 2021…

They probably didn't hurry because they had contactless payment long before that.

And Americans will typically try to cut it any number of ways that aren’t “the US is uniquely behind the times, given their wealth”.

The reality: When I was working retail, in 2010 mind you, customers would very routinely be surprised and annoyed by the fact that our store didn’t have terminals that accept NFC payments.

When Apple Pay came out in…2014? 2015?, all the American tech pundits were talking about it like it was futuristic alien technology.

I’ve spent exactly one week in the US, ever. I was in Seattle. If I used my card to pay for food at a restaurant, it was entirely common and accepted for someone to take my card, scurry away, and come back at some point with something for me to sign. Back home, they’ll bring me the terminal so I can just tap my card (or phone, or whatever), or they’ll do it for me in the case of a card, and that’s that.

It’s such an odd thing to get defensive about.

The way payments in restaurants are typically handled in much of Europe is convenient but to the parent's point, the obsession with never letting go of your card sometimes seems a bit excessive.

Most of the non-major banks are a pain to even open disputes with — not to mention:

- having to receive a new card (a pain if one's frequently on the road, or if the bank doesn't ship overseas);

- change any recurring billing details, if needed;

- possibly set up direct debits (sometimes with paper forms, like in Singapore);

- some other stuff I haven't thought of.

Ah, yes, "if it's NIH, it's probably because we're so honest we don't need it".

That makes no sense. Ive been doing contactless payment in the US long before apple Pay.

Pretty sure my Amex did it back in 2010?