Originally Posted by
GSBEWR
Have Chip cards been around that long that there really are merchants who have no idea about the mag stripe? (Or are those merchants really young kids who were babies when Tony Blair was Prime Minister?) Or have most of them simply switched to devices that don't accept mag stripes?
It's not even a new problem. I ran into this buying a train ticket in the UK in 2009, the cashier had to ask the other cashier how to handle a swipe card. I figure that many retail environments are fairly high turnover with younger employees, who were probably kids when the UK switched to Chip & PIN. Any area or merchant that sees a fair number of American tourists should be familiar with handling magnetic stripe cards.
This month I was back in the UK and didn't have any issues with Chip & Signature (I primarily used a card with a PIN backup, and one place actually did have me use the PIN and it worked). UK banks do issue Chip & Signature cards to customers with certain disabilities, so they're not completely unheard of there.