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

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)