Yep. The transaction was about 4 dollars. I'll post receipt when I get home showing the Amex and "PIN verified"

I had my first EMV transaction at the Bensalem Walmart this evening. The cashier commented that I was the first customer she had seen use the chip reader. I tried to get a few pictures, but of course my camera phone betrayed me and didn't actually take any photos. Here is a scan of the redacted receipt:

http://i.imgur.com/wDxED3Sm.jpg

I've also done a transaction at a Wal-Mart in California using a Canadian VISA card. PIN was required.

I suppose that must have made you feel right at home, eh.:)

Walmart's chip roll out must be 100% complete as I made a purchase last week at the Rabun County (Clayton, Georgia) store. It is in a used to be remote area of the north Georgia mountains where Deliverance was filmed back in 1972. The cashier said they had installed them about 2 months ago.

No offence, but that's incredibly flawed logic. It MUST be 100% complete because ONE store has it. Wow. And has had it for about two months, at which point I know it was NOT 100% complete because I had a counter-example.

That said, I have no counter-examples, so I do wonder how close to 100% complete they are, or if they might now be.

While it's difficult to prove that all stores have it - and disproving would require only one example - it's safe to say there have been reports of EMV transactions in various locations in the US, including urban and rural areas. There's no reason to beat up on the poster. The assumption there is that more remote locations with few customers likely to have EMV would also be the last stores to be equipped for EMV transactions.

I remember a friend commenting to me how his local supermarket had this cool system where you could ring up your items at an unattended register. "It's like an ATM but for checkout lanes!" This was in the early 2000s, and I remember self-checkout having been common where I lived at the time for more than 5 years. On a related note, it also makes for embarrassing situations when you find it you live in a test market for something. Before Starbucks quit mailing free drink coupons nationwide, Pittsburgh was a test city. The cashier at a store in New Jersey looked at me like I was from another planet when I asked if she could use the free drink I had while trying to do a mobile payment. However, within a few months all stores and cashiers had been trained on this process. I imagine WM is similar with its rollout of EMV.

Agreed, but I think that was part of my point - small rural stores have clearly not been the last ones Walmart has rolled out EMV acceptance to. In my own town, the small store got it first.

Tin foil alert: Walmart knew there was at least one person in Missoula, MT who had EMV cards so they activated it there for you. ;)

Refresh my memory if wrong, but don't you live in border state? That might have been the reason.

I live in a border state too (with Mexico; which also uses EMV) and in a state with cities where we get lots of tourists from abroad, but most of our CA Walmart stores weren't turned on until this month. So being a border state with an EMV country (Canada or Mexico) or places where they get lots of foreign tourists (Los Angeles) wasn't the whole criteria.

I'd have thought that if the big store in the main shopping area was the one to get EMV earlier, but it wasn't... it was the one that just got it, it was the small store only locals and university students would go to that got it a couple months ago.

(bolding mine)

Perhaps the university has a lot of foreign researchers or visiting faculty/students?

Actually, I think we're completely overthinking this. Most likely each store turned EMV on whenever the manager decided to read the memo from corporate and flick the switch.

That'd make sense since the manager at the large Walmart here is a total ***** so it'd make sense she'd wait longer, but somehow I doubt the managers have that much control :)

And actually, yes, if there is a pattern my theory was that it may be based on volume of EMV-capable card transactions and the number of cards from the uni outweighed the number of Canadian cards.

But really, I doubt there was any meaningful pattern.

Sorry you FAILED TO NOTICE my effort at a little humor. After all, many folks outside the south think we are bunch of backward hicks;)