[techsupporter]

I suspect a lot of comfort with what happens with credit cards in the United States comes from people believing that their card issuer will simply handle the problem if any fraudulent or merely unauthorized charges appear. There's no risk from the card going out of sight if the card is useless because the card issuer will reverse charges upon request. (Moving to chips, even with signature, is supposed to alleviate the main source of fraud here, that being cloning the card.)

That said, I'm with you; I much prefer to have my card handled just once and within sight. It is faster, safer, and, to my mind, simply more convenient.

[Slartie]

You are probably right, but that comfort comes at a price, and the price can be seen right there in the original article: 2.6% + 10 cent credit card payment overhead.

And that is considered "cheap"! By contrast, in the European Union there's a cap of 0.3% on credit card interchange rates and 0.2% on debit. Of course that's just the raw interchange fee; a small merchant has to pay more than that to its card processor, but there are all-inclusive, Square-like offers for debit card processing fees below 1% for small merchants, and larger ones manage to keep both debit and credit processing cost way below 1%.

So the "comfort" of being able to hand over your credit card to someone who takes it out of view and possibly does unauthorized stuff with it increases prices of all the stuff you buy by roughly 2-3%.

[DominikD]

Is this actually the case though? Even if your card is taken by the staff and you don't see being charged, you are still being charged and some entity is processing the payment. I find it hard to believe that there are no fees just because terminal is stationary.