because america hasn't caught up with the rest of the world. I'd guess about half of all restaurants still take your card to swipe it at a machine tethered to the register. it's getting less common in stores and fast food restaurants though.

Much closer to 100% IME. I think I've seen a mobile terminal once, in an airport restaurant.

Probably at least 80% of sitdown restaurants in my suburban town in the US seem to have those portable card readers. Now I can’t even think of the last restaurant I ate at that didn’t do that.

In the UK there is no swipe. Everyone has mobile card readers. Even tiny food trucks in the middle of nowhere have mobile card readers.

The UK also does "chip and pin" authentication for requests, so the waitstaff are forced to either bring a portable cardreader to you or for you to walk to a terminal and enter a code. I think this is why mobile card readers are so common.

In the US, most credit card transactions are simply "(swipe or chip)". If you have the card, you can use it. Gas stations seem to be the slight exception in America -- they generally require "(swipe or chip) and billing zipcode". This is quite funky and not at all secure against fraud.

In the US a few months ago, a food truck used one of those carbon copy card swiper things. And yesterday I tried to pay for a cabin reservation and the lady took it down over the phone and said she'd run it next week. Many grocery stores and gas stations still swipe. Our tax people still use faxes and our hospitals manually create and deliver CD-ROMs for medical imaging. We're not a very advanced country, lol.

In UK. Even the stalls at the school fair take cards now.

I've even seen buskers in London with a machine set up so you can tap your card to tip.

Edit: apparently this was a thing even back in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/27/busking-joins-...

I remember seeing panhandlers with a mobile card swiper as early as 2009.

swipe is all but gone in the us. Will still say swipe, but that isn't what happens.

Bringing a reader to the table is gare though, mostly a thing at the large chains that are pretend to have ethnic food, but it is really poor quality-

I wish swipe/on card numbers were completely gone here and chip only too. I use my phone for most purchases, but most restaurants here haven't caught up on wireless pay.

I figure not every restaurant has the money/motivation to invest in the mobile POS and so it's still not super common.

Handheld card readers are price competitive, or at least marginally more expensive. I’d attribute it more to the time investment of switching POS systems.

Everything is weird in the US so can't tell how different it would be, but in Chile you can get a handheld personal car reader [1][2] for around ~25USD to 50USD, even if they needed something more specialized I really can't see them becoming prohibitively expensive, even the matching POS from the same company is just like 400USD[3]

[1]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-air?variant=399949779... [2]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-solo [3]https://sumupchile.com/products/punto-de-venta

I can get the same deal here if I look for it, nothing special about Chile, etc. Most restaurant/business owners aren't tech savvy and will switch when their equipment fails, not to keep up with tech trends.

How is that better than.. just paying with the device you already have, without having to bother the waiter?

It's more work for me.

With NFC card payment I just hold my card to the terminal and that's it.

I'm afraid most US chains/restaurants will only change their equipment when their equipment dies. It's going to be a few more years to a decade I think. Most of these units are pretty reliable and can go for a decade or more easily. At least most POS at gas stations, chain stores take NFC now.

Tap phone, confirm payment, tap fingerprint reader to confirm.

vs

Try to flag down waiter (x5), ask for the bill, wait for waiter to return with the mobile POS, fiddle around in your wallet to find the card, tap card, decline tip, write PIN code, finally get to leave.

most restaurants here are take your code to their payment station. With all the insurance against fraud in the USA I don't care. I've only had it happen once and I'm pretty sure it was with a skimmer/MITM at a big box store roughly 15 years ago. They actually had used my 3 digit code on the back in an online purchase.