When I visit the US I basically forget that contactless payments are a thing. You guys seem so keen to want a physical card.
Drive-thru window, the hand comes out to take the card off you! Restaurant, same thing, they want to walk off into the back with my card. There’s many examples I could give, yet if you just held out the card machine instead I’d tap with Apple Pay. For the country that invented this stuff it seems odd.
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Odd, because I’ve had the option to do that for years, except for at a restaurant where I sit down.
Because nobody really cares. Those who like it, use it often.
The rest of us are indifferent because its just not worth the energy to care about something so minor.
Retrofitting everything is expensive and often cost prohibitive for smaller establishments. Pretty much anywhere you are at a register(till) that has a modern card terminal will accept contactless payment(looking at you, Home Depot).
It’s often not enough of an incentive for drive-thrus and restaurants to replace all of that hardware for something that is simply a convenience and not an improvement such as chip cards with better encryption.
Additionally, there’s always been a heavy influence of buyer protection and being able to easily get fraudulent transactions nullified, so our worries of handing cards over to someone is pretty much non-existent.
Honestly the obsessive worrying over cards just seems odd to me. Are crime rates that high in the UK to justify this worry? Or is trust in society that low? Are restaurant workers really going to charge your card with excess charges if only they could take it out of site?
Here in the US, our fast food restaurants are (mostly, with some exceptions like Chil Fil A and Starbucks) franchised. This means they’re individually owned and operated, so they get to decide which payment they take. Some may have it, some don’t. I have started to see some terminals set up outside window for tap cards, but I imagine these can get damaged very easily.
As for sit down dining, I don’t know, I imagine its just a lot less bother to have one payment terminal rather than 20 portable ones. But there’s plenty of restaurants that do this as well. I went to a local diner that had me scan a QR code, and another their servers are equpped with tablets for orders. Some of the chain sit down restaurants have those airport like terminals where you order and pay at the table. But each business gets to decide what is best for them.
The one tap-to-pay holdout in my daily life is Kroger. They’re currently “testing” it in select regions but they really want you to download the Kroger App and use Kroger Pay but fuck that noise.
I use contactless payments like that every time I get gas (petrol to you, limey) it exists in some places
My store has tap in the drive thru, but I’ll only hand out the machine if you have your phone out already. If you have your card, I’ll take it and tap it.
Only places that don’t take it are drive thrus and restaurants for the most part
Although McDonald’s offered to let me use Apple Pay once at a drive thru
Alternatives are to use the app of various fast food places
I don’t understand the affinity for being handed a reader. it’s awkward and more work for the customer. I have to take off my prescription sunglasses in a drive through bc you can’t see those screens with polarized lenses, so now I’m half blind, blasted with the sun, and making this poor Starbucks barista hold this machine out for me as I try to see.
a friend of mine works at a sit down restaurant where they have these readers & they get complaints from customers who don’t feel comfortable putting in the tip with the waiter right there. it also feels kinda tacky and disruptive. I want to just put my card down and not think about it.
I pay contactless at almost every store I go to. I don’t even use my card, I use my phone or my smart watch.
Most drive thrus don’t have them, but at least half the sit down restaurants and nearly every store does have them.
Specifically to vex you
I see it all the time here.
The main reason I don’t use it as Applepay requires me to have a passcode on my phone or something like Touch ID to use it. For me the convenience of being able to pull out my phone and not having to ID myself outweighs having to pull a card out of my wallet
There are a lot of places that support contactless payments. I use my phone to pay for stuff all the time.
The US was late to upgrade to contactless payment systems, but it’s been happening for years at this point. It’s available at a lot of places, but you might have to ask for it.
Yeah, every country I’ve been to in Europe seems several years ahead of the US when it comes to payment tech adoption. I’ve had kind of the inverse of your experience, where European service workers have been accustomed to state-of-the-art payment schemes, then struggle to process my payment because I still only had a swipe card or a chip and they had forgotten how to do that lol.
I really don’t know why it is. Somebody once explained to me that it had something to do with how our banking system works differently and is more diverse than in European countries, so it’s more difficult to standardize such things. Not sure if I buy that. That said, I *am* confident in saying that many many *many* Americans will never be convinced to use their phone as a form of payment, out of privacy concerns. Perhaps our culture is a little too suspicious of big institutions to keep pace with Europe on this sort of stuff?
Many places have it. However, if you put out your phone they’ll pull it out. Or, if it’s that much of a concern, you can ask prior to ordering or going up to pay. It’s just not used widely enough for anyone to assume that’s how you’re paying so it’s no one’s default
I pay with Apple Pay all of the time
I pay with Apple Pay all of the time
I use Apple Pay all of the time
I pay for literally everything with my phone except laundry
I’m not buying the premise of your question
That said, I don’t do drive-thrus so I don’t know about those
I mean, i dont generally trust massive tech cooperation #3 with my credit card information. I dont have it saved anywhere.
There are way too many data breaches.
I know there are also ways to bypass a physical card, but id rather have one less method personally.
I don’t even know what you’re talking about…. We have tap everywhere, maybe that’s bc I’m in LA
Keep in mind that about a decade ago, a very large group of retailers/companies banded together and deliberately shunned contactless, believing that mobile wallets would completely replace contactless cards. Some of these participants (Walmart and Kroger in particular), still choose not to adopt contactless card readers.
It’s worth noting that we’re not responsible for credit card fraud here, the credit card companies are. So if someone steals your card and you see $8000 worth of charges on it later that week, you call the company/go to their website, tell them which charges are fraudulent, and they remove them from your account as if they didn’t happen. The card is canceled immediately and a replacement arrives a few days later. It costs us nothing but a little time. As a result, it really doesn’t bug us to give the card to servers or drive through workers.
That said, contactless is becoming ubiquitous quite quickly here. Restaurants are still behind on it, but most other places (other than Kroger) have updated
How long ago were you here? Over the past couple years, nearly everyone has been accepting contact less.
I think you’re a bit late on this question.
Depends on where in the US.
I love it now, if I have forgotten my purse, I can use my phone to pay for nearly everything!
Historically, the norm in the US is that restaurants ran cards by taking your card to the back and running it through the terminal at the point of sale system there.
In other countries (in my observation) it’s been common for quite a few years to have places use handheld/portable readers.
I would suspect the difference comes down in part to when widespread adoption of card/electronic payments happened for those sorts of establishments – handheld/portable readers were either unavailable or expensive/impractical 30 years ago.
(Also the US laws/regulations are way friendlier to the customer than they are in some countries – so we have fewer concerns about CC fraud, it’s generally not the customer’s problem).
Anyway, I do see more places in the US starting to roll out the handheld/portable terminals now, so I suspect this distinction will fade over time.
Why do you assume we should or must do things exactly the way it works where you live? You and too many others forget or ignore that USA is geographically enormous and resistant to new tech until we can figure out how to profit from it.
That said, as with so many other things, ***we’re working on it***. It simply takes time to roll this out all throughout the US, and y’all need to learn patience.
I tap my card or use my smartwatch as much as possible.
Why are you guys always convinced someone is trying to rip you off?
*You* seem odd for trying to give us an inferiority complex over our technology.
As far as “walking off into the back,” that’s where the POS (Point-Of-Sale) terminal is. It’s plugged into a phone line so it *has* to be where it is. Places don’t have a lot of incentive to update to more modern technology, like the Ziosks at every table at big chains like Olive Garden or Chili’s, which do take contactless.