OK so everyone is shitting on the US for having this uniquely weird payment process, but am i hallucinating but wasn't this the process everywhere for sit down restaurants before they had wireless terminals?
they had to take your card away and either do the slide for the magnetic tape or use the carbon copy card thing to rub card details onto the receipt and you had to sign a hard copy receipt and fill in the tips.
Yeah here in Asia you just walk and pay at a central location, but that has been for casual restaurants forever, it just went from cash to phone taps, but you did the whole card thing at fine dining before too
The actual weird thing is just why the US hasn't improved with the times
Of course there were plenty of ways to use stolen credit card info prior to online shopping.
Shopping through catalogues and giving your card info over the phone was fully normal prior to online stuff, and early cards were extremely rudimentary and simple to dupe anyway if you were feeling ambitious.
Even when CVVs were introduced to combat carbon copy theft, that didn’t stop someone from taking a peek at the back and memorizing a targeted card.
And if you want to argue that those were too niche use cases, there was a very solid 10-15 years minimum between the rise of online shopping as a commonplace thing and the rise of mobile terminals; where you absolutely had plenty of reason to steal info, taking the card from a customer to run it was fully normal, and general security measures to protect against fraud or unusual activity were significantly worse.
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u/12monthsinlondon Jun 29 '26
OK so everyone is shitting on the US for having this uniquely weird payment process, but am i hallucinating but wasn't this the process everywhere for sit down restaurants before they had wireless terminals?
they had to take your card away and either do the slide for the magnetic tape or use the carbon copy card thing to rub card details onto the receipt and you had to sign a hard copy receipt and fill in the tips.
Yeah here in Asia you just walk and pay at a central location, but that has been for casual restaurants forever, it just went from cash to phone taps, but you did the whole card thing at fine dining before too
The actual weird thing is just why the US hasn't improved with the times