While the rest of the world has long been on a Chip-and-PIN credit card system — much more effective at preventing fraud than magstripes and signatures — the US has had be drawn kicking and screaming to it.
Today is supposedly the deadline day for US retailers to accept new chip-based credit cards or else face liability for credit card fraud — but card manufacturers have been slow in distributing them, retailers have had problems getting the equipment (or even learning they need to), and the whole effort is looking exceedingly half-assed.
And even once chips are accepted, retailers will still be using signatures because the American public cannot reliably remember 4-digit numbers (except for debit cards, oddly enough, and ATM cards, and a dozen different others).
We'll see how it goes.
Today, all stores in the US should accept chip-and-PIN cards. Yeah, right.
Liability shift is beginning of a very protracted end for magnetic stripe cards.
The major downside of electronic transfer is you don't see your money leaving. Before accepting your PIN, the law should require an animation of $20 bills being burned once per second to the total of your purchase.
The only place I've seen near me that has the chip readers is Target. My banks were good about getting the chip cards to me, but no one is set up to take them yet.
Most of the retail places I frequent have them — but I've yet to see one where the chip reading slot is actually active.
Added interesting note from the article: I'd had the impression that the US was generally going to stick with signatures, vs the (much more secure) PINs. The article implies that PINs are still in the plans, which is a good thing.