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>Until 2018 card purchases required hand signatures, 15 years after Europe switched to chip-and-pin. Wow. That's really surprising. I haven't had to sign for

• hnlmorg 6y ago
  It's so much worse than that. Restaurants and bars are allowed to pre-authorise your card so that they can deduct payment after you've left. The rational is that they can calculate tips but frankly tipping has never been an issue in Europe and we are present when the card is deducted. I feel so uneasy using my card when eating out in America vs Europe.
  • prussian 6y ago
    as you should. I know my mom was accidentally overcharged due to exactly what you described. I recommend everyone get some kind of charge alert and react to them appropriately, or at least look over the statement.
  • lucideer 6y ago
    I worked for a while in a restaurant in the US while I was a student on an exchange VISA and I found this system absolutely wild. As a zero-experience teenager new to a very temporary job I felt I was given way too much arbitrary power over people's payment cards. (everyone signing for card payments did also seemed weird at the time as, while there was no contactless back then, we'd been 100% chip-and-pin in Europe for some time, but I think that was a more well-known oddity of the US)
  • umanwizard 6y ago
    I haven’t been to Europe for a few years so my memory is vague, but at least in Canada, you can enter a tip on the point-of-sale machine (and waiters/bartenders will get very aggressive if you don’t leave enough, despite the stereotype that “tipping is only a thing in the US culture”). Other than that parenthetical, does it work the same way in Europe? For those who don’t know, in the US it works like this: a paper receipt is brought, which you write a tip amount on in pen and then sign. The total is then manually entered into the computer later on. Absolutely medieval technology.
    • NamTaf 6y ago
      That's how it works in Australia, on the fairly rare circumstance that you come across an option to even leave tips. Generally everyone just presses enter through it.
    • aerique 6y ago
      I don't know about the whole of Europe, but here in the Netherlands when the bill comes and it is €45.87 I'll say "make it €50" so we pay once for bill and tip.
    • Milner08 6y ago
      Some times yes, the handheld card machine they bring over will give you the option, but its not super common in the UK. Most likely people will either tip in cash if they have any they can scrape together (becoming increasingly rare) or just say "round it up to Xyz" and get them to charge us that.
    • cromka 6y ago
      Not anymore, really. The pandemic and the implied heightened hygienic regime has caused an almost complete shift to POS payments, including the remote ones brought to you. You choose a tip by tapping on the screen and get charged that amount right away, without deferring adjustments. Contactless payments supported as well. I don’t remember last time I had to sign for my purchase. The first time ever a terminal was brought to me in NYC was July last years. It is a tremendous, almost overnight change. I since lived in Miami and San Juan, it’s the same everywhere. You just have to indicate you’d be paying contactless. If you pull out a card and ask for a check, there is a chance they will still handle it old-school, though.
    • KineticLensman 6y ago
      > Other than that parenthetical, does it work the same way in Europe? It varies significantly depending on which European country you are talking about (we have massive social variations across our 30 or so countries), and then on factors within each country, down to the policy of specific pubs/restaurants and pub/restaurant chains. In the UK, I've seen at least two specific cases (I don't eat out very much, even before the pandemic). These are: the waiter hands you a device where you can enter a tip as an amount or just click through to the final payment, OR the waiter themselves enters the final amount - without a tip - and then just hands you the device to press 'OK'. They will add a tip if you ask them in time. I haven't signed a card receipt for years.
  • oefrha 6y ago
    > pre-authorize Is there actually any (pre-)authorization going on? My impression is as long as they have your card number, they can charge you whenever they want, the only deterrence being not committing fraud. Once I dined at a local restaurant (in the U.S.) and only realized I forgot to bring my wallet after the meal. I wrote down my credit card number and that was it.
• iamacyborg 6y ago
  > I can't read the rest of the article but they mention the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard (and I guess Amex is the only other issuer?) causing a stagnation. Diners Club is also a thing.
  • umanwizard 6y ago
    And Discover, though those two are far less common than Visa/MC/AmEx.
    • iamacyborg 6y ago
      Yep, although I'm interested to see what'll happen with card schemes if Open Banking in the UK/EU allows direct peer to peer payments.
    • rory 6y ago
      These two are the same network now, so if a vendor accepts Discover, they accept Diners Club and vice versa. Discover bought out DC in 2008. My understanding is it's pretty tough to compete with the big guys in this market because you need to build out a huge network of vendors who accept your card for it to be useful to customers.
      • iamacyborg 6y ago
        I previously worked at a company that provided card payment terminals to merchants in the UK. IIRC around the time I was leaving Discover/DC were offering us financial incentives to support their scheme across our network of merchants.
  • cdjk 6y ago
    Yes, but can you get a new Diners Club card in the US? When they last offered consumer cards it was just a co-branded MasterCard (which did have chip and pin, which was cool, but otherwise it was just a normal MasterCard)
• jamesrr39 6y ago
  FWIW, Visa and MasterCard have a pretty substantial market share in europe as well (in most EU countries, I think it would be fair to call it a duopoly). I'm not sure why europe switched to chip and pin so much earlier than the US, my guess would be on regulation though.
  • Rafert 6y ago
    According to https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2012/html/pr120725_1.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2012/html/pr120725_1... it was part of the SEPA migration but as a customer I remember quite a lot of card skimming happening too at the time, and banks accelerating EMV rollout to stop that.
• the_only_law 6y ago
  I had something weird come up recently. Went into a gas station, bought an age restricted item. Was not ID’d. I end up having to replace my debit card multiple times per year sometimes because of fraudulent charges, etc. and can never keep track of my PIN. So I ask the cashier to process it as credit. He suddenly started asking for ID and wanted to record it. I’m guessing it was some sort of anti fraud measure but it was somewhat awkward.
  • psychometry 6y ago
    You shouldn't use a debit card for everyday purchases. Use a credit card since it offers you far more protection against erroneous and fraudulent charges.
    • Milner08 6y ago
      While true, outside of the US credit card usage is not as common. Many of my friends don't use them, I barely ever use them. The only time I ever really think about it is to get bonus points for airlines.
      • psychometry 6y ago
        Yes, I'm aware, but the person I responded to is very obviously from the U.S. or Canada.
• ghaff 6y ago
  Signing is becoming less common in the US but there are a few local places where I have to touch pen to paper. When I use US cards in Europe, I often have to as well given lack of PIN--it's one reason I try to use Apple Pay when traveling there.
• xtracto 6y ago
  The credit card cartel (with their asinine PCI controls) has to be burned in a fire. It's expensive, inconvenient and inefficient for all the parties except the members of the cartel.
• blueblisters 6y ago
  In the US, the card networks along with banks spend a huge amount of effort towards reducing consumer frictions by asking for the minimum amount of verification during a purchase. This was perhaps the primary reason why cardholders are rarely asked for a pin after a purchase (what if they forget it)? Of course this leads to increased fraud, which often has to be borne by merchants and leads to increased prices.
  • orev 6y ago
    Placing the burden of fraud on merchants does make sense, as they are the ones present at the time of the transaction, and theoretically in the best position to authenticate the purchaser, via ID, etc. If a merchant is doing a bad job at it, and their prices go up, then consumers go elsewhere for those goods, incentivizing the merchant to prevent fraud. It seems to work well enough most of the time via market forces instead of needing government regulation and enforcement.