Originally Posted by
lhrsfo
Owning a small business which takes cards, the reason why retailers were slow to change concerned the availability of machines. We used Vantiv at the time (now part of Worldpay), which was one of the largest merchant processors. They only had one machine capable of taking chips, and that only became available two weeks before the deadline - making it next to impossible to order and install the machines and be confident they worked before the deadline. This was, of course, gross incompetence on the part of the merchant processors since the machines required were in common use everywhere else in the world, and had been for over 10 years. And, as a PS, the machine that did become available was an old model machine which didn't support contactless - presumably old stock from Europe which has pretty well entirely shifted to contactless.
There were definitely a lot of issues. I've come around to the idea that the 2015 liability shift should have been pushed back a year or two (even if the card networks did announce it back in 2013 or so). If it were, I imagine the first software available would have been a lot better and chip wouldn't have gotten nearly the bad reputation that it did. Plus, with a lot more places having it working from the start, there'd have been less awkwardness around where to insert vs. where to swipe.
In fact, that might have been what they were thinking when the gas pump liability shift was pushed back to 2020--to try to avoid a repeat of the issues that happened during the initial migration.
Originally Posted by
KRSW
This is FlyerTalk! Only 2% back for gas? You're doing it wrong. Off the top of my head, Costco Visa is 4% gas, Sam's Club 5% on gas. I'm sure there's others.
For sure you can do better. But if you're in the target audience for Apple Card (as in, someone unlikely to
want to bother juggling cards to maximize rewards), 2% is pretty good.