I assumed it had rolled out across most of the US at this point since most of the smaller places had even implemented it.
This is true. It's also weird, since really they should be charging less for chip-and-pin, not more for magstripes. By moving to chip-and-pin they immediately release themselves from the hook for card theft, moving the liability to the card holder. The high transaction costs in card networks have historically been defended as largely stemming from fraud costs. Yet, we're expected to pay the same fees.
It's a good time to be in the card processing business.
FWIW, it may be a bank requirement, not a vendor one.
"Beginning in October 2015, that liability will shift to the merchants in certain cases unless they have replaced or upgraded their card acceptance and processing systems to use chip-enabled devices and applications to process payment transactions."
1. http://www.emv-connection.com/understanding-the-2015-u-s-fra...
EDIT: Grammar
Seems like no one is on the same page
I understand the US is doing a slightly slower rollout so you guys might have to put up with either/or for almost a year, but once it is done you'll get used to using the chip pretty quickly.
The two "big" dates for EMV in the US is Oct 2015 (liability shift: merchants) and October 2017 (liability shift: fuel dispensers and ATMs)[0]. After Oct 2017 there will be no reason for banks to issue cards with a magnetic strip at all (although they CAN for travel).
In Europe some banks no longer issue cards with magnetic strips (chip only).
[0] https://www.aciworldwide.com/-/media/files/other/published%2...
[1]: http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Speeds-...
Now that the chip cards and functioning readers are the norm, you see a lot of terminals with a piece of paper taped onto them that says "NO TAP".
I've tapped my card at some merchants who were unaware that their terminal had been tap-enabled. "We don't have tap yet" "It's approved" "Oh!"
Putting the card in the same pocket with my Android phone with a wallet case that has a magnetic "lock" seems to be enough...
They are vulnerable to a set of physical attacks e.g. etching off the surface of the chip, scanning it with sensitive microscope and attempting to deduce stored data from that (IIRC there were some proof of concept videos posted on HN a few months ago) but it's not a major risk as it (a) requires physical possession of the card, (b) takes time and is destructive, and the result is useless once the owner reports the lost/stolen card, and (c) has significant costs (rare expensive equipment, specialized skills, lots of time) that far exceed the limits on normal credit cards.
If I'm reading this right, it still doesn't compromise the data on chip (i.e., the card cannot be copied, the limits enforced by chip are kept, etc) but allowed to modify the chip so that a physically stolen card can be used without knowing the PIN because the POS erroneously accepts a PIN verification response from another chip. This described hack seems to be impossible in recent chip implementations as well, but I'm not eager to dig through specs to check.
Still, it is still similar to the chip analysis vulnerability in risk as it (a) requires physically stealing the card and modifying it - thus it doesn't enable the far more common scenarios of skimming the card by an ATM device or a person e.g. waiter; and (b) doesn't allow to clone the card, so purchases must be made quickly by people physically close to the thieves and operators doing the chip-modification, so it means a much greater chance of arresting the whole team than in the currently common fate of stolen US card data where you can just sell the data to people anonymously over internet, and they themselves can easily make cloned cards to make the risky part of actually obtaining the money/goods.
A skimmed card will just work on the first try. A card modified like this is still likely to trigger "stolen, call the police" message on the POS terminal.