Ah, sounds like those restaurants are probably all using the same acquirer. Walmart in FLORIDA has had EMV enabled for years now. Most of my credit card use is at the same few places, which makes sense why I haven't seen it. Traveling next weekend which will mix up my usage a little, maybe things will change.

Your probably right about the same acquirer they all seem to be using the same terminal. I think it was a Contactless Ingenico terminal, its the same/similar terminal that all McDonalds and Boots (National drug store) use here in the UK.

Interestingly in a bit of a turn of events, I had my card swiped at a restaurant here in the UK this evening lol The chip reader was broken. He did say it was a pain as about 15% of the transactions were being referred lol.

Being referred? Not sure what that means.

And Boots is no longer a British national company. They're American now, actually (part of Walgreens, which oddly enough means their cosmetics products are no longer sold here - Target USED to sell Boots products).

Referred as in where the merchant has to call for authorisation as an extra security check.

Never knew that about Boots. You learn something new everyday.

Yeah that happens a LOT with magstripe cards in London, especially buying Underground tickets, though normally they just type 0000 for the auth code instead of actually calling.

Worse than this is in Europe when cards are refused because they don't want to swipe it when there is a swipe terminal. An example is in Holland where all of the swipe areas are taped over but still work. They will do it, but for some reason don't like doing it....

I've never had the chip work in the USA outside of Walmart, and often have intelligent cashiers look at my card and say 'what's that?' when looking at the chip :)

The reason they don't like swiping it is because they don't understand the liability shift concept and believe they're responsible for any fraudulent transactions if they swipe a card (no, they're responsible if they only have swipe terminals, but that's a distinction hard to get across).

That, and the ones staffed at the cash register these days in most industrialized nations these days are mostly minimum wage earning part-time cashiers who are just following SOP protocol written by corporate HQ. The idea of "well if they want my money, they'll have to do it via swipe" might be ingrained in most older Americans these days, but the reality is that these days, people who want your money aren't the ones working the register - they are in a board room making conference calls to their stock holders. :)

If you are a minimum wage earning cashier working the register at a major retailer and the SOP manual provided by corporate says "do not use swipe" that's what they are going to do.

You can whine and complain about things like EMV, swipe, VISA/MC merchant agreements, from the standpoint of those people working the register, it's all gibberish. To them it's just "I get paid [minimum wage] and I'm only here for the summer as a part-time worker, I'm not making this my long term career, I'm just doing what the employee handbook says and frankly I could care less."

Last I week I was at the local airport and I saw the dispatcher/agent for Great Lakes using one of them. I almost forgot they even existed.

Exactly why the fact even the new Capital One Quicksilver isn't an IC card is just kinda... blind to people's real needs.

It's still in use as the backup of all backups, as carbon copy imprinters can be used without electricity or telecommunications. In times of disaster (i.e. Japan's Tohoku earthquake of 2011 or Hurricane Sandy in 2012), these things come into action.

Hence, somethings like raised numbers (though some cards these days are coming out without them) are better kept intact in consideration for out-of-the-ordinary situations like natural disasters and such which carbon copy imprinters come into action.

I don't know about the US but they've had a 0 floor limit for a few years in the UK now, so for a retailer to be guaranteed funds they have to call up for every single transaction.

I don't know but I'm pretty sure some floor limit is allowed when authorisation isn't feasible. For example, I used a Visa card in Glacier National Park last week - a long ways from any phone/internet/mobile service and the transaction was offline. Swipe card, sign receipt, done. No authorisation and no way authorisation would've been possible.

Afterwards, I wished I'd tried my Bluebird card just to see if they'd have taken it which DOES have zero floor limit and it clearly says so on the card.

I recently used my new Citi VISA AA card that has a chip, and when the attendant swiped it, it did not work. He asked his supervisor who said that the reader did not work for cards with chips and told him to manually input in the card number. He did and it worked that way. I have not had any other problems with a card reader not reading the info off the magnetic strip.

From personal experience, many machines completely ignore the service code anyway or the machine asks if the merchant is sure they want to process it offline. Chip cards are a different story and will automatically decline the transaction with no override possible.

I meant the floor limit on the manual imprinters, floor limits for electronically processed transactions are still allowed as some sort of electronic data is stored. There are still several transactions that work offline, Contactless in most EMV countries is offline (Unless its a prepaid card)