In Europe!!??

So glad you got it sorted and restores my faith that there are decent and good people out there. If only there was an app to identify people like that ! And just as an aside, I have lost count of the amount of times in the US that I stick my chip card in and am standing there hovering my digits over the keypad, until I am whisked back to the 1800s and asked to dip the quill into some ink and sign some velum! :)

My bad. I mistakenly thought you were commenting on China because I didn't read your post thoroughly enough.

This. Amazing that the rest of the world brings the chip reader to the table and yet we gladly hand it over to whomever and let it disappear for a few minutes. We are dopes.

Another flaw in the US implementation is that many machines still support hand written tips, which effectively opens up doors for fraud in what is advertised as an air tight system. While I don't think machines can or should eliminate the tipping culture, I'd feel a lot safer if I was forced to add the tip electronically, and confirm by entering a PIN. I'd also like to see the baseline reset to 15%, plus 10% and 12% options for bad service.

This is the way in Canada. Although several versions exist, the most common one (for me) goes like this:
Turn unit to customer -> OK -> Confirming amount $nnn. Add tip? -> Yes ($) / Yes (%) / No. --> Enter tip amount ($ / %) -> Confirm new amount OK --> Enter PIN (if card inserted) or tap card --> Approved, printing copies for client and merchant.

It's a similar process in the UK.

I believe this has a lot to do with cost effectiveness of avoiding fraud. I used to work for a CC operator, specifically calculating monthly losses and the talk was always that in the American market there was less of a need for security measures as they were expensive and their losses weren't that significant. As the cost to implement this solutions drops I believe the US market will finally be able to justify its installation across the country.

Sorry if went too far off topic here.

While I can appreciate this position to an extent, my --perhaps mistaken-- assumption was that the costs of swapping out old POS machines for new POS machines was/is substantially higher than the incremental cost of requiring PIN entry as a base level feature on the new machines. To put is slightly differently, why bother with the hassle of migrating to new machines at all if they aren't meaningfully better than what they replaced?

While I have sympathy, I'm curious ... did the aliens swoop down and whisk you off to China? How did you manage to get into this most interesting situation?

I think most people just travel there by plane.