I should preface what I'm about to say with my own personal day to day experience since I feel that's important in order to describe better why I prefer C&S domestically, at least in the short term. I think we can also agree that chip and PIN will not pose a problem anywhere that can already handle debit or otherwise already has a terminal on the customer side of the counter (e.g. grocery stores, Walmart, etc.)

The first time I use a credit card in a particular day is usually a local donut/breakfast type shop on the way to work. There's two I usually go to, neither which are chains; one is cash-only while the other takes cards. The latter's terminal is behind the counter and isn't easily accessed by me. Sometimes I'll just use the vending machine at work instead (also cash only or cards depending on the machine).

I also don't typically bring food from home for lunch so I usually have to go out for lunch. There are several places I tend to visit that are within walking or short driving distance, all which aren't chains, take cards and which have terminals that are inaccessible to me. Once in a very long while I'll go to somewhere that has a terminal on my side of the counter, such as Subway, McDonalds or Rubios.

The common theme here is that a lot of my in-person spending is at smaller merchants. In fact, chain store spending for me is mostly places like Trader Joe's and Vons (what Safeway is called here), which I'll go to about once a week or two.

I will grant that none of these places have EMV turned on yet and a large number seemingly haven't even purchased new terminals. However, I have run into a large number that have placed said new terminals in pretty much the same places their old ones were. Which works for now while EMV isn't turned on, but another thing makes me think that the positioning of the terminal may not change.

There are also a few with new terminals that are on MasterCard's PayPass locator site now, which means that Apple Pay/Google Wallet should in theory be accepted. Of course, in reality I can't even tap my card or phone because I can't reach over the counter to do so. If merchants that supposedly accept Apple Pay (arguably the payment industry's best chance at getting contactless to be accepted by Americans) can't be convinced to change their terminal positioning, I'm not sure how EMV is going to pan out once it's turned on.

Which all leads back to this: do I want to try to walk someone through how to turn on the NFC reader on a terminal or even convince them to try moving the terminal, if that's possible? During a busy lunch rush? No. I'm going to do the path of least resistance, which is to hand over my CSP or some other C&S card for swiping/inserting. I'm also not going to rely on PIN bypass because I'm not sure BMO will even approve such a transaction. And if they don't, I'm going to have the give the merchant a C&S card anyway or pay cash.

I will grant you though that C&P is preferable security-wise over C&S. It's also still significantly early in the EMV migration. A large number of smaller merchants will probably still be magstripe only by October as well, or will possibly adopt signature only terminals like Square or one of those POSes with a chip slot in it that someone posted about over in the EMV thread. It's also still possible that acquirers will finally start training merchants on correct terminal use and we'll see terminal positioning become a whole lot better. But right this very second, C&S is a lot easier for me while in the US.