Originally Posted by
tmiw
Agreed on the security improvements. I was referring more to how PIN still isn't required (and likely never will be for reasons discussed hundreds of times before) plus how a large number of places still run cards for customers vs. having customers do the inserting or tapping. If it was just PIN not being required but we got everything else Europe, etc. have (e.g. ubiquitous contactless acceptance and near 100% pay at the table at restaurants), I could live with that.
I watched other transactions for the last month, grocery and other retail.
PIN is alive, but for debit cards, suggesting any issues with PINs are solvable by the consumer, if they must.
Swipe is alive, but seemingly not for credit cards. It seems to turn up for debit was well as other similar cards, eg: loyalty cards that have a magstripe as well as a barcode. There seems to be less of an occurrence with bad magstripes where the clerk does tricks with plastic bags to get it to read. In some cases a transaction requires two payment cards so at least some POS systems are handling splits where it's not an oddball transaction.
Inserted Chips seem to be mostly working, but occasionally bring the operation to halt when the chip mis-reads the first time.
Contactless doesn't seem to be in as much use.
For Inserted and Contactless, most people wait for the transaction to finish before inserting. It's faster if you do it and get it over, especially the contactless, but people want to see a number. This appears to occur even when the keypad does ask for the amount to be approved before finishing the transaction, for higher value transactions.
The above isn't data, it is more a collection of anecdotes and different geographies would probably turn up different results.