[nlanier]

I'm fond of New Zealand, where you either pay as you walk out or the waiter brings you a mobile POS. There's no awkward 'take my credit card, walk away with it, and bring it back' moment. It's a much better system, and I would love to see it more common in the US.

[voidUpdate]

Do waiters really walk off with your credit card in America? I'd never want to let my credit card out of my sight, let alone let some guy I don't know take it from me

[ty6853]

Cash is vastly vastly preferred for restaurants in the USA by both sides.

This is also has the advantage that if for whatever reason it is impossible to pay because all the servers have disappeared and no is up front, you can just calculate out the bill+tax+tip from the prices in the menu, lay it on the table, and leave.

Most the problems around credit/phones revolve around the fact that restaurants are operating around customs and inertia of the cash system, and awkwardly injecting other collection methods into this routine, personally I don't bother fighting it.

[baseballdork]

> Cash is vastly vastly preferred for restaurants in the USA by both sides.

What two sides are you referencing? I can't fathom that customers is one of those sides. Cash is just about my least preferred method, maybe second only to writing a check.

[JohnFen]

Cash is my favorite way to pay. I'm with you about checks, though. I haven't even had a checkbook for 20 years or so.

[baseballdork]

Sure, I believe there are lots of folks who prefer cash. I just don't think "vastly preferred" is accurate. [1] suggests that only 20% of all transactions are using cash...

1 - https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/statistics-for-cash-and...

[cafard]

For the wait staff, cash has the great advantage that it is up to the staff to report tips to the IRS. For everyone else?

I do carry cash, and probably use cash more than someone younger would, but for restaurant bills beyond the burger and brew range I tend to use a credit card. Once one gets into the white-tablecloth world, bills are beyond the amount of cash I usually carry.

[JohnFen]

> Do waiters really walk off with your credit card in America?

Some places still do, but most places I've been to post-pandemic have the servers carrying handheld POS terminals and do it tableside.

[ryandrake]

I’ve only ever seen this outside the US. Everywhere I eat, they do the traditional “disappear with the credit card” song and dance.

[sgerenser]

Same here. The table side reader thing is something I only see at maybe 1 in 10 restaurants in my part of the U.S. During the pandemic there was a big uptick in “pay by QR code” but that seems to have gotten much less popular (I believe the extra fees charged by Toast and similar are no longer deemed worth it by restaurants).

[rsynnott]

They used to elsewhere, as well. In most European countries chip and pin became ~mandatory around the turn of the century, which made it impossible.

For various reasons the US was very slow to adopt chip-based cards, and even when it did they were usually chip and sig. It was also slow to adopt tap to pay (likely because mobile terminals were less of a thing, because chip and pin was not a thing); it only _really_ took off when Apple and Google kinda forced the issue by putting it in phones.

[atonse]

I believe you may have it slightly backwards.

I think Apple and Google released their implementations when they did exactly because the US credit card companies moved over to EMV (tap and pay) standard.

There was a “liability shift” [1] that happened nearly a decade ago after many high profile card database leakage events (target retail stores being one).

The shift was that instead of credit card companies always accepting the liability for stolen cards, the policies were changed so that retailers that still used magnetic stripes would have to accept liability (because with magnetic stripes, the same card number is used everywhere). Or they could avoid it by moving to chip and wireless readers, since these protocols used a different virtual card number for every transaction.

As card holders, we all started getting our banks sending us new chip and wireless cards before Apple Pay came out.

1: https://squareup.com/us/en/the-bottom-line/operating-your-bu...

[rsynnott]

> exactly because the US credit card companies moved over to EMV (tap and pay) standard.

That's not what EMV is, or, at least, while most tap and pay cards are EMV (besides some 90s oddities in Europe), EMV long predates tap and pay (it's from the 1980s).

Most US cards were EMV (chip and sig, usually, not chip and pin), _long_ before Apple/Google Pay came out, but usually did not support tap to pay, which is a separate standard also falling under EMV (the terminology is kinda unhelpful).

[atonse]

Thanks for the clarification!

[wyclif]

I don't like it either, but yes they still do (although to be fair it is getting rarer by the day). One thing to keep in mind though, is that if it's a reputable place there isn't really any need to worry. It's shadier places you have to watch out for.

[tialaramex]

This used to be normal in a lot of the world, which is pretty wild. Lots of weird changes like this, Floppy Disks, "Appointment Television", home phone numbers ...

For most of recorded human history literacy was rare. A typical Roman citizen could not read, certainly beyond the ability to understand a handful of marks or make their name. By the nineteenth century it is entirely unremarkable that Patrick Brontë's daughters are taught to read and write, but it is also entirely unremarkable that several of them† died of TB since at the time we didn't know a cure for it.

† It's contested whether, for example, Charlotte died of TB, it probably didn't help.

[xeromal]

I'm kind of digging the QR code on a receipt where I just pay from my phone's browser, get emailed a receipt, and I leave at my leisure. Been seeing this around busier places in the US though still pretty rare.

[rapnie]

Same in the Netherlands. And also the ridiculous QR-code DIY waiter thing doesn't really take on, luckily.

[insane_dreamer]

Nearly all US restaurants I've been recently use a mobile POS.