Somehow I feel like the US will be the last country doing that (and will only stop because Visa/MC or the government mandates it). I really hope I'm wrong but it doesn't look good so far.

I'm another who uses my card all over the UK and Europe but mostly London -and the only time my card was ever cloned was in the US so I'd like to see cards stay in sight in the US too.

The mobile card readers are designed so you can cover the screen as you type in the pin . I really don't understand the resistance to it in the US .

I'm sure you know this, but that's a pretty small sample size and statically not really significant.

Except for the self-service kiosks at Chilis and a few other restaurant chains, my only experience with pay at the table is at Walt Disney World, where those staying at a Disney hotel are given RFID wristbands that can (optionally) be used to charge things after you put a credit card on file. The waitstaff has portable readers with keypads, which are used to scan the wristband, then given to the customer to enter the pin and tip amount. I like it. It's much quicker and more convenient than sending your card off to who knows where, and there is less chance of a mixup if you're with a large party with multiple bills and multiple cards. When the US finally goes to chip and pin, I hope many restaurants invest in this tech. It will reduce fraud and speed up the payment process.

Love the Ziosk!

The resistance to metric is not about the cost of signs, it's about two things: 1) cost of retooling factories, and 2) resistance to change.

Retooling factories can cost millions, and it's a lot harder than replacing signs through attrition. Whole manufacturing processes, from design through delivery, have to be altered to meet metric specs. Some has already been done, as US manufacturers have been making metric parts for export for many years, but with 100 years of automotive parts, electronics, and appliances all using bolts and threads in inches, a true switchover means that mechanics and repairmen would have to have two sets of tools for decades... which they already do in most cases, except in building trades where there is simply resistance to change.

The idea of learning new a new system of measurement frightens many Americans, who are already overloaded with remembering 12 inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 5280 feet to the mile, not to mention teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, ounces, pounds, tons, and of course square and cubic whatevers. They seem to feel that learning a system based on tens on top of what they already can't remember is just too difficult.

If only they'd realize that metric works exactly like American money, which we all know by heart from early childhood, maybe resistance would decrease.

I once heard an idiotic argument that metric is inherently less accurate, which boggles my mind. Accuracy is determined by the method of measurement, not the units.

Resistance to chip and pin exists for the same reasons as resistance to metric, a) cost of buying new chip and pin equipment, and b) resistance to change. The retooling cost is a much more minor thing than retooling factories to metric, however, because CC machines tend to break and need replacement often enough to make it easy to upgrade.

I've been seeing more and more chip and pin machines over the last year. Walmart seems to have switched over all of the machines in all of their stores in a very short time, and it appears that 7-11 is also doing so now. It will take smaller businesses longer to change, as it's harder for them to absorb the expense of buying replacement equipment, so they do it less often. Heck, a local gas station in my neighborhood actually stopped accepting debit cards at the pump for several years because there was some change to the financial laws that would have necessitated them buying new readers for all six of their pumps, and they chose to not accept debit instead - losing customers in the process. After 3 or 4 years, they finally replaced all of their readers and started accepting debit at the pump again. I didn't go back, because when they finally upgraded, they also started charging the higher credit price for debit transactions, and I'll only patronize stations that charge the lower cash price for debit transactions.

Resistance to change is harder to overcome, but once the change is in place, people will complain for a while, then forget that it was ever different in the past.

I've already run into a table service restaurant that has chip readers but still takes cards away from tables. And they can get away with that precisely because we're actually chip and signature and not chip and PIN. (On top of that they apparently didn't disable PIN on their non-portable readers so I got to walk into the "employees only" area to enter the PIN. A pretty poor experience but at least they didn't reject the card altogether, which has happened at a couple of places too.)

To be fair, PIN won't be a problem at the vast majority of places, but for most restaurants it's not worth the extra expense for the portable readers or Ziosks when they might get a foreign card maybe once a month or less. Pay at the table in the US is far more likely to take the form of a mobile app than portable chip and PIN readers IMO.

The resistance on the consumer side (which is fairly small, especially because few people realize it is coming) has mostly to do with having to remember yet another passcode, and some confusion about debit cards and whether that means if someone steals your card and code, are they now going to be able to take all your money in one transaction.

The bigger resistance is on the business side, which had a lot to do with regulations, which have now been dealt with, and the cost to small businesses to update their equipment.


About Metric...

You may be confusing precision with accuracy. Accuracy is how close to the actual value you come. Precision is about units - for instance 1 decimal place versus 2. The concern is that most metric measurements require lots of decimal places to get to the same level of precision as the imperial system.

But there are actually a couple of more important reasons. For one, imperial is actually a little bit easier when you understand it. You are dividing base 12, which means division is easier than base 10 (you can divide 12 by more denominators and get whole numbers than you can 10). Plus, you don't actually HAVE to do the math, you just write a fraction! Another factor is that it is more real world based. Metric may have very precise bases for its measurement units, but they don't relate anywhere near as well as imperial does for the base unit. An inch is about the distance from the end of a thumb to the first knuckle. A foot is about a foot. Temperature is realistically based around what is the coldest most people encountered long ago and 100 was about as hot. Who the heck experiences when water boils? And we often gt temperatures well below when water freezes, so why have to go negative?

That in the end is why the US has been able to stick with it - being more consumer/public driven, the government has not had the power to force change even when it didn't improve things.

re metric i US (in this thread? huh?) - national population, state population, state power
didnt change a long time ago, metric started relatively shortly after US independence

I don't see how this is any different than a mag stripe debit card, except that chips are more secure from interception and less prone to failure from use than the mag stripes.

I don't know how your card and pin can both be stolen at the same time, anyway, unless you're one of those foolish, foolish people who writes the pin on the back of the card. If you're that stupid, you don't deserve to have a debit card.

The cost of equipment updates is substantial, especially to small businesses who might get the cheapest reader available and use it until it falls to dust. I don't blame smaller businesses one bit for being resistant to change, though I hope that cheap, mobile-device-based chip and pin readers are available, like those available for mag stripe cards (i.e. Square and other such devices). The changover might have to be slow, but hopefully it's inevitable.

Imperial is Base 12? Based on what? The fact that there are 12 inches in a foot? Because that's the ONLY 12-based division in the entire Imperial system. Everything else is based on dividing things in half and half and half again, which is less precise than decimals.

Rulers are typically marked in 1/2", 1/4", 1/8", 1/16", 1/32", and sometimes 1/64" increments. Building trades seldom go lower than 1/8". Automotive and appliance measurements seldom go below 1/32. Machinists tend to use decimal inches rather than fractions, i.e. 1.004" instead of 1-1/256".

Anything fraction-based is confusing as hell compared to the simplicity of decimals. Trying to add 12'-2 7/64" plus 19 5/8" is a lot harder than adding 3711.169mm plus 498.475mm. Decimals, whether inches or mm, can be added easily without conversion. Fractions require conversion to the lowest common denominator, and when you mix yards, feet, and inches together, you cave to convert yet again to get everything into the same units before you can even begin to deal with the fractions or decimals.

As to "relateability", what is more relatable than counting to ten? Base-ten math is our go-to precisely because it's the most relatable base, since humans default number of fingers and toes is ten.

Neither thumb length nor foot length are anywhere close to being a "relatable" common frame of reference. Trying to say that an inch is the length of your thumb is dumb, because all thumbs are unique, and vary wildly among individuals of different genders, age groups, racial groups, and body types. And have you been in a shoe store lately? How long is a foot? Anywhere from 7" to 14", and that's just the adult feet.

Besides, that argument is a non-starter. When people think about inches, feet, yards, or miles, they never think about thumbs and brazos, they think about the inch-foot rulers and yardsticks we grew up with. THOSE are the real-world objects they relate to measurements, and that mental relationship can be established among schoolchildren just as easily with a CM ruler and a meter stick as they have been with rulers and yardsticks.

Are you kidding? So 0F is as cold as it gets and 100F is as hot as it gets, like anywhere that people live? You do realize that even in ancient times, before the Imperial system was created, people knew that it got colder up north and hotter down south, right? Even for an American, that's a ridiculously parochial attitude; everybody knows it gets well below zero in the upper midwest and well above 100 in the desert southwest. Is 0F relatable to someone who lives in Miami? Is 100F relatable to someone who lives in the Upper Peninsula? How realistic is any of that?

And by the way - we've ALL experienced boiling water. Temperature is not just for measuring the air, it's also for measuring, well, EVERYTHING. I don't care where you grew up or where you live, every human being on earth has at some point in their lives encountered boiling water.

Frankly, is Imperial is so much better and/or easier than metric, why has it been abandoned by THE ENTIRE WORLD except for three stubborn hold-out nations (at least one of which is in the process of officially switching over now)?

In the end, the US looks like a bunch of April Fools for not having switched to metric five or six decades ago.

In the US the gov't is more geared towards protecting large corporations and making sure they're all comfortable and cosy rather than imposing upon them. Consumers come a very distant second compared to the corporate world.

The EU is different: people come before corporations.

But at the end of the day it should be in Visa/MC's interest to actually push this forward themselves on a voluntary basis. Sure it will be a great cost to move from magnetic stripe to chip-only, going from a disappearing card to portable payment terminals, but if they don't do this then Apple or Google will eventually step in with a new system that will take over. And when it does so in the US, just watch it spread like wildfire across the globe and put current card issuers in the back seat...

The US is switching to chip though. The point is that since we're only doing chip and not PIN there's no justification to do pay at the table using portable card readers like in other countries. And my current experience with using chip cards in US restaurants seems to be bearing this out thus far.

We are not doing PIN, just chip and sig? I missed that part.

There's a 700+ page thread discussing it:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...signature.html

In short, there's only one issuer offering "true" chip and PIN (and not simply cards that have a backup PIN for kiosks) that people can apply for right now. If you're fortunate to have Diner's Club, your card is chip and PIN as well. A few others briefly had it but switched to chip and signature.

Also, I was thinking some more about how common pay at the table via mobile app could end up being. Even though apps like OpenTable could add support for Apple Pay and Google Wallet, one app is likely not going to become dominant. I'm not sure people would be willing to have three or four different restaurant pay apps installed on their phones just to avoid having their cards taken away from them.

I dunno. Given our obsession with smartphones, and our cavalier attitude toward personal security and privacy, I wouldn't be surprised to see people accumulate a bunch of payment apps on their phones and keep them logged in all the time with no password or security feature activated on the phone.

Given our notorious resistance to change, which is overcome only by our love of uber-convenience, I do expect to see a proliferation of self-service table pay devices like the Ziosk used at Chilis. The current model uses mag stripe cards, but I'm sure that new models that accommodate chip and sig, or even chip and pin, are on the horizon.

Personally, I don't see why there any CC company would go with chip and sig in the US instead of chip and pin. It just doesn't make any sense to invent a new standard. Hell, most US-issued credit cards already have a pin, for use in making cash withdrawls at ATMs!

That's different than what we are moving too, though. By October, merchants need to be accepting chip and pin cards or they become liable for any fraudulent activity. http://www.qsrmagazine.com/exclusives/are-you-ready-emv

Personally I think we are really in a lurch on this, as they haven't quite figured out how to roll out the new cards, but they are coming.

indeed.

They just have to accept chip, not necessarily chip and PIN. That's why Square's new chip reader is acceptable for the purposes of that liability shift. Foreign cards still work, they just won't be given the opportunity to enter a PIN and will have to sign instead.

It also depends on the restaurant too. Major chains and restaurants in tourist/border areas would probably do the tablet or portable reader thing or at the very least switch to pay at front, but something like that is a lot less justifiable for somewhere that caters to locals. Visa/MC would probably need to ban taking cards away to come close to fully getting rid of it in the US market.

I don't know if "happy" is quite the word I'd use. Tolerate might be better!

Though a lot of the older generation seem to despise the small amount of metric we have now. I remember a few years ago when several greengrocers refused to display prices or weights in metric - some of them happy to even go to jail over it!

Finally. Get with the times haha.

if chip has not already been compromised (that would be surprising) it wont be long, and then it just becomes less easy than skimmers

recently heard about a group that was intercepting credit card terminals on the way to retailers, defeating countermeasures (which were not just technological) used by manufacturer, then picking up credit card data via bluetooth after terminals installed

recently in canadian grocery stores i noticed metric except for pounds of meat, thought that was interesting

Is there any way we can split the metric conversation and the chip and pin or sig conversation?

Sure. How would you like it split, using inches or centimeters?

I ust recently dined some place that had pay through the opentable app and ApplePay. It actually was quite nice and pretty genius. I was able to review my bill throughout the meal and then pay right in app... they also gave me the choice to tip on the pre or post tax amount. REally really convenient....

But in regards to the main crux of this thread, I prefer having the card reader come to the table. I think the main limitation is that chip+pin offers offline verification allowing the card readers to not need a data connection...

FDW

Rods, chains and links, I think.

i have swiped at the table.

and apple has the iphone with credit card swipe reader for example.

Why is that a limitation?

It may have been back when WiFi wasn't as common but it's not so much now. I don't think it's even possible to buy anything that supports offline transactions any more, at least in the US.

In China many restaurants have Q codes printed on the tables. When you have finished your meal all you need to do is scan your table's Q code with Alipay/Tenpay and pay in the app. I find that less intrusive than having the waitress come to your table with a machine.

clearly pay by phone etc is least intrusive, but not everyone wants pay by phone

there seem to be a TON of mobile pay apps

Are non-Chinese allowed to sign up for Alipay/Tenpay? Do they allow anything other than UnionPay and possibly Discover through the app?

I'm Canadian and I have an account with both Alipay and Tenpay. You do need a mainland China bank account though. A Discover card probably won't do it.

To register with Tenpay you simply have to download the WeChat app and follow the instructions in the "Wallet" tab. It's possible to add a Visa/Mastercard but only Unionpay cards will work in China.

To register with Alipay you need to be in China (you have to send a scan of your Chinese visa and entry stamp) and have a bank account with one of the big commercial banks. The whole process is a pain but once you are in it's great.

Pay at the table: Good
Chip and pin: Good
Chip and signature: Good
"Ziosk" and the like: Bad

As an American who spends a non trivial amount of time abroad, not having chips in my cards has been becoming ever more a pain, because in many cases they can't (or won't) do strips. The cost of updating infrastructure in the U.S. is probably a bigger blocker than user acceptance in this case.

These table tablets, on the other hand, are just one more way to remove human interaction from our lives. If I find myself at an establishment that has them, I immediately set it screen down at the farthest point possible from where I am sitting. They usually get the message.

I love it. I always wonder what is happening in the back when I give them my credit card. Is someone writing down my credit card number?

DON

It seems as though people are fans of the chip and pin technology, but as a Canadian who has been used to this system for years, it has become a headached for me. My debit card(s) has been compromised many times, even with a chip in the card.

As for paying at the table while the wait staff stands there....yes it can be uncomfortable, but i'd prefer that they come to me for payment as opposed to me chasing them down or paying at a pay station.

It probably kept getting compromised because the US is still (but will gradually stop) using magstripe. Sorry :(

Exactly, together with the three digit code on the back. It is rumoured that some even have cloning machines to replicate the mag stripe.

What fun, being able to review the bill throughout your meal, so much better than talking to the folk you are dining with, or reading a book if you are eating alone.

I agree, even with Chip & Pin cards get compromised. But at least you have the protection of someone having to do the compromising to get your PIN, in the old days how many stores/restaurants etc actually compared the signature on the slip with the one on the card? Not many in my experience. So no compromising required - just a lost/stolen card.

Even today in the US, where old-fashioned signatures are still the standard, very few businesses attempt to match the signature to the one on the card or ask for picture ID. One pizza shop near my house does as a matter of store policy, but that's it. I feel well protected that a thief who boosts my card will get shut down attempting to charge $8 for a couple of slices and a soda, but will get away with widescreen TVs and airline tickets because there are NO point-of-sale checks there. :rolleyes:

+1. Far too many horror stories. Pay at the table any day or at cashier's of one must... No losing sight of your card, no possibility for anyone to tamper with your chosen tip amount, and certainly no need for waiter to look over your shoulder.