I noticed this recently as well at Walmart. Tried to swipe my card and it didn't work, swiped again and it didn't work. Finally bothered to read the error message, which was "Insert Card into Slot at Bottom of Terminal."
My experience in Europe has been with Chip and PIN, I wonder why we're gravitating toward Chip and Signature.
"Most card issuing banks and Visa don’t want PINs because the PINs can be stolen and used with the magnetic stripe data on the same cards (that also have a chip card) to withdraw cash from ATM machines. Banks eat the ATM fraud costs. This scenario has happened with the roll-out of chip cards with PIN – in Europe and in Canada."
US credit cards (both chip and non-chip) have PINs they're just used only at ATMs when taking cash advances. The article jdeibele referred to said that if you forced people to use their PINs all the time the rate of cash advance fraud would go up since it would be more likely that a skimmer would have the PIN (since there would be more opportunities to intercept it).
> My experience in Europe has been with Chip and PIN, I wonder why we're gravitating toward Chip and Signature.
Americans love credit cards and those who use them tend to have a lot of them. I personally have six credit cards and three debit cards (and, yes, I have a reason for having each card). My father has a wallet more than 1 in (2.5 cm) thick from all the cards he carries. According to the Boston Fed the average cardholding consumer had 4.0 credit cards and 1.6 debit cards in 2012[1]. Forcing people to memorize a PIN for each card they have would discourage people from signing up for more than one or two cards which would be a nightmare scenario for the credit card industry.
Chip and pin isn't any more secure than chip and sign, and is a greater hassle. For a while, merchant banks would deny fraud claims from skimmers claiming that the victim must have let the fraudster know the pin. However, as the card has to be on the magstrip as a backup, it's trivial to clone a pin. A friend had to fight for a fraud claim on her card a few years back, with the bank giving her that line. thankfully, she is dyslexic, and has chip and sign as an accommodation, so she was finally able to get enough words in for the rep to check her account flags and realize there was no way in hell she gave a pin to anyone, because her account doesn't have a pin attached to it. Chip and sign cards have pins on them for various silly reasons, even if there is no way it would ever be used.
The first few times it was really slow, but recently it's only added a couple seconds to the transaction. I really think this will be a non-issue in a couple months.
It seems to me like it's only going to get worse as more people get chip cards. The cafeteria at the office where I work replaced their card machine earlier this year with a model that accepts EMV cards and since we have a lot of employees that travel internationally a good chunk of the people that work here pay with an EMV card (myself included). The increased card processing time has resulted in a noticeable increase in the wait time at the register, commonly backing up the line by 1-3 people. I recently figured out the terminal also supports NFC payments so now I use my phone with Android Pay (since it only takes 1-2 seconds vs 10-15) but I'm the only one who uses it so far and I'm not sure anyone else knows.
My experience in Europe has been with Chip and PIN, I wonder why we're gravitating toward Chip and Signature.