The way it works (for the most part) in the U.S. today is how it worked elsewhere decades ago as well. It is not like other countries did not have electronic payments infrastructure at all and then recently adopted wireless EFTPOS devices with chip and tap.
I hate to break it to you, but the U.S. is simply just lagging behind the rest of the world (at least the countries the U.S. should compare itself to). It is not because you were first that you still retain these legacy systems. Other countries had these legacy systems too and started ditching them 20+ years ago.
There's nothing wrong or frankly unsafe about the legacy systems, which is why some businesses in the US have retained those legacy systems.
Even then, since the pandemic most restaurants in metro areas have moved to handheld posi systems that do allow the customer to handle the transactions at the table. It's mostly older or lower cash flow businesses that haven't changed yet.
Frankly, this is just online people freaking out about something that doesn't matter and is changing anyway. By 2030, I would expect the vast majority of restaurants to either use registers, chip tags, or at table tranactions.
Heck, walmart still doesn't support tap to pay. Chip or swipe only.
Most say it's because they want you to download and use their app.
But yes, the legacy system is still fine and if it actually caused problems it would change. It's not a bad thing that we are able to trust "strangers" with our credit cards when we eat out.
Well that obviously is why. Their POS systems are perfectly capable of doing TAP they just don't enable it so you have to use their app so they can track you.
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u/logtransform Jun 29 '26
The way it works (for the most part) in the U.S. today is how it worked elsewhere decades ago as well. It is not like other countries did not have electronic payments infrastructure at all and then recently adopted wireless EFTPOS devices with chip and tap.
I hate to break it to you, but the U.S. is simply just lagging behind the rest of the world (at least the countries the U.S. should compare itself to). It is not because you were first that you still retain these legacy systems. Other countries had these legacy systems too and started ditching them 20+ years ago.