If us dummy Europeans have managed it for years, one would think you clever Americans would be able to get to grips with it too...
You can't enter your card until about 10 seconds have passed after all your items have been scanned, or it blows up.
You must leave your card in for ~20sec, or it blows up, while the machine does seemingly nothing.
The quickest you can complete a transaction is ~30+ seconds; after all the items have been scanned.
Compare this to ~5 seconds with the swipe method.
Now, take 25 seconds / registers * people. That is the lower bound on how much additional time we must wait in line because of these BS machines.
Trader Joe's is now a wasteland of wasted time standing in line.
What pos terminal did you use? Besides you can just use NFC in Europe these days which is even faster.
And now with wireless PIN transactions less than €25 are instantaneous. And above again take the time to enter the PIN.
That's the US we're talking about, I'm quite sure their banks built everything from scratch without taking into account what a few decades of use have taught European banks.
It was also slower than is it today when introduced, at least in France (though mostly because connection was over dialup or GPRS).
TJ's put in the new machines and those machines have the constraints I described above.
Europe, its ilk, and their terminals are completely irrelevant.
Not really. It's a valid comparison to figure out what the cause of the problem actually is.
More likely it is just poor specifications and poor execution.
The tap terminals have existed in the US for years. Usability was pretty much the same as the swipe method: fast and easy.
Also, yes, the banks suck.