I've had mine checked at restaurants, before.

But heck... nowadays stores don't even require a signature for low dollar amounts. And those electronic signature things? I "sign" them with a squiggle wholly unlike my real signature.

Signatures only matter if there's a dispute.

I'm still trying to educate our local merchants on this too.. I mean, a big part of the whole idea is that they're not supposed to have their grubby fingers on the cards with the new chip system.

Cheers

I'm seeing distinct regional differences here...

In these parts no restaurant will ever check a signature. That is, a sit-down place where they bring you the bill, you hand them the card and they come back with the authorized copies. 100% of the time the wait staff drop the stuff off and walk away in fact.

If it's a restaurant where you go up to pay at a cash, that should be lumped in with stores. And in that case I suppose they might or might not.

Opposite of Mark's experience, here in this part of Ontario, every merchant I've been to that has a new machine has been very quick to point out that I don't need to, or rather shouldn't, give them the card and that I need to insert it into the machine myself.

When i first got the card I had forgotten it had a chip and tried to hand it over. It still happens sometimes if I don't realize the merchant has a chip terminal.

Talk about cultural differences, Or maybe it just my age, but I was used to handing the CC over to the cashier, first for imprinting and then later swiping. When the buyer operated card readers (mag stripe still) appeared, I was put out about swiping the card myself. That was NOT MY JOB!

Having the consumer mess with the transaction terminal just slowed everything down. Still does.

Cash Rules!

Cash has been on the way out for a long time. Here in Ontario gas stations won't take anything over a $50 bill. And if you do give them a $50 bill you'd better be pumping 50 worth of gas, because you're not getting any change.

It's a shame too because the AEG washer I bought a couple of years ago is perfect for laundering money.

So If you tender a $20 for $10 worth of gas, You get change.
But, If you tender $50 for $40 worth, You get no change?

Not that I disagree with you — quite the opposite — but cash slows down the transaction even more, but that's largely because no one running a register can make change any more without the register telling them what to do. I'm surprised that they don't have registers that tell the untrained-monkey-wannabes the exact coins that should be given back.

Then add on top of that this weird compulsion that they have to try and balance coins on top of bills and hand it all back to you at once.

And god forbid that you give them additional money after they plug it into the register; seldom has any person in the history of the universe been more dumbfounded.

Coin auto-dispensing registers are becoming quite common, actually..

Yeah, where's that coming from? When I worked at mickeydees (age 14), they taught us to hand over the coins first, then the bills.

Nowadays it seems everyone is taught exactly the opposite -- coins on top of the bills in a single unmanageable pile. WTF?

Taught?!? Ha!

I haven't seen one since the mid-80s.

Most supermarkets here have them.

They do! Saw it at one of the local convenience stores. Big blue nearly full screen box popped up.

1 quarter
1 dime
3 pennies

This is not normally visible to the customer but one of the POS stations is 90 deg to the counter.

It's because of the way change is made now. Used to be that the clerk counted the change up from the sale value, to the tendered value. Now the electronic organ grinder tells the monkey to give back $2.11, and that's how they count it out 1+1 is 2 dollars and 11 cents on top.

Just as bad, is that the clerks are required to put the ten mile long register tape in your hand even before counting out the change.

Register tapes for small purchases used to be a lot smaller than a dollar bill. Now even when they are shorter they are still wider.

Damn kids, get off my lawn.

Or if you purchase something worth say $15.95 and give them a twenty dollar bill and 95 cents in coin, hoping to make it easy for them to just hand you back a five dollar bill (and offload some weight from your pocket into the bargain).

Even worse, if your bill is $4.77 and you give them $5.02.

Come to the chat late - my tuppence worth:

Chip and Pin in the UK - the popular attack route just now is to skim the card anyway, knowing you only get the magstripe details, then ship the details to countries where that is all that is needed. Remediated if you keep the card with you at all times, or through decent statistical analysis by the bank spotting that your card is used in a weird way!

PCI DSS - not worth the paper it is printed on. It offers very little in real security, but is a useful audit check box. Case in point - Worldpay (have a search on the FBI site for some juicy details) passed PCI DSS not long before being taken to the cleaners. The level of testing required by PCI would not help protect against upwards of 80% of the common attacks against financial services organisations.

Meh - feeling ranty today. Only 2 days left at my old job :-0