I think anything else (other than pay at the front, I guess) is insane. And the vast majority of people I know here in the US agree. Most people I know (not technical people generally) HATE that they take the cards away. It doesn't take a techy to realise that this is a huge vector for fraud.

I'm not sure what the question is...is it about card security or is it about whether you should get up from your table and pay at the maitre-d station? Wherever I eat in the world (US included) the bill is brought to me at the table, and I pay at the table. Some places then have the waiter scurry off to find a machine, and at other places they swipe it through the main till and come back with the bill. Either way, I'm not really bothered.

I've used pay-at-the-table card scanners while traveling abroad, and I like them. I like the greater security of my credit card not leaving my control. I've never felt like the staff were hovering over me, waiting for me to finish. Of course, in traveling abroad, there's rarely been the dynamic of how much I'm going to tip the person who's standing right there as I pay.

We eat out all the time. Hand over our cards all the time. Never had an issue.

I'm not sure I understand. I use Google wallet at my grocery store which does not take chip cards.

I'm fine with any payment approach (at table w/machine, no machine, front payment register) and do not care if the server is watching what I'm putting down as a tip if applicable.

When I used to use Android I tried to use it as often as I can. Unfortunately the places where I could use it were few and far between. Apple Pay made NFC mainstream and basically removed any cost justification that retailers had to buy the non-NFC capable credit card terminals for their chip card upgrades. As a result, there are far more places where one can use NFC now.

+1
going to a place that ISN'T like that is rare!
And often I find it's smaller places where you just get up and pay on your way out.


I"m not too worried about my card being compromised. I mean that's what credit card protection is for after all.
Then again I do watch that thing pretty closely though, especially when I travel.
Having said that, if it was to be compromised, it'd likely be at home.

At full service gas stations, I always get out of the vehicle, regardless of the weather, to take my card inside to pay so that the card isn't out of my sight.

I've never worried that much about restaurants, but I don't tend to eat in sleazy places (unless someone else is paying).

AmEx seems really good when something bad happens involving at least their higher end cards.

if youre using pin, obviously hold a hand over machine while entering.

and pin obviously requires at the table, and they dont know if you dont have pin.

i was annoyed that tax was included in tip percentage. (i knew it would be, but server said it wasnt.) im guessing restaurants sometimes take it (the tip on tax portion) rather than server.

amex is best regarded for disputes. to the point that they may help with fraud, and merchants complain.
at one point diners club was also well regarded, maybe only for business, and i think it went downhill.

I agree. Allowing your card to simply wander off and then return 10 mins later is going to be a thing of the past pretty much everywhere by the end of this decade.

It still works this way in Singapore and I haven't had any issues with my cards (the only ones I have had were with a Singaporean company not securing its stored data properly). But sooner or later it will be a case of paying at the table everywhere (or just paying by the counter upon leaving the restaurant).

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.