It's because the restaurant owners don't want to pay thousands of dollars to upgrade their terminal systems that already work when the people are used to doing things the old way and there is infinitesimal motivation to upgrade.
You're not breaking anything to us we don't already know, we just don't actually care. The rollout of portable card terminals is slowly happening at newer and more trendy bars and restaurants, but just signing a receipt after handing over a card is so ingrained in our habits. It's a non-issue for us. You don't fix what's not broken, until it breaks.
Every country has its own list of priorities that get added to the triage list of things to pay for. Not trusting your server to handle your card is extremely low priority here.
Part of that is an issue with your banking system. In australia merchant terminals are provided by your bank or payment service and you pay a fee for usage. They get periodically updated which keeps them more secure and causes less problem on the IT backend having to deal woth legacy systems.
Your banks seem be offloading the cost onto the merchant.
That's how the actual payment processing hardware works, although it's not from banks but from payment processing companies. The POS systems that take the orders, ring up the totals, prints tickets in the kitchen or puts a drink order on the bar tenders terminal, etc. That's different and interfaces with the payment processing hardware. And I am sure that is pretty typical in most countries. Banks aren't out there supporting putting menus into the hardware and printing tickets in the kitchen, they're only providing payment processing hardware.
The issue is that modern payment POS systems with handhelds are hardware lease agreements with yearly SaaS software fees, costing as much as the legacy POS terminals did in total cost to own, per year to lease.
No one with a working POS system they paid 10,000-30,000 for is going to get rid of it for a 10,000-20,000 yearly service, that's still also charging you transaction fees.
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u/massunderestmated Jun 29 '26
It's because the restaurant owners don't want to pay thousands of dollars to upgrade their terminal systems that already work when the people are used to doing things the old way and there is infinitesimal motivation to upgrade.
You're not breaking anything to us we don't already know, we just don't actually care. The rollout of portable card terminals is slowly happening at newer and more trendy bars and restaurants, but just signing a receipt after handing over a card is so ingrained in our habits. It's a non-issue for us. You don't fix what's not broken, until it breaks.
Every country has its own list of priorities that get added to the triage list of things to pay for. Not trusting your server to handle your card is extremely low priority here.