I hope this takes off solely so I can pay with a credit card directly at my table at restaurants instead of having them take it to back of house. Much of Europe has been doing this correctly for a long time now
Instead, right now we get this madness, especially at a lot of smaller shops, where the clerk is using the merchant side box to enter the payment amount then fumbles around with the customer side pad to insert the card and complete the transaction for me.
Just let me tap or enter my PIN, please.
(I have two cards that are PIN primary. I've put stickers on both that read, in large letters, "THIS CARD USES A PIN PLEASE ALLOW ME TO ENTER IT." On one of them, it has, in smaller letters, "THE TRANSACTION WILL DECLINE IF YOU DON'T.")
That said, I'm with you; I much prefer to have my card handled just once and within sight. It is faster, safer, and, to my mind, simply more convenient.
And that is considered "cheap"! By contrast, in the European Union there's a cap of 0.3% on credit card interchange rates and 0.2% on debit. Of course that's just the raw interchange fee; a small merchant has to pay more than that to its card processor, but there are all-inclusive, Square-like offers for debit card processing fees below 1% for small merchants, and larger ones manage to keep both debit and credit processing cost way below 1%.
So the "comfort" of being able to hand over your credit card to someone who takes it out of view and possibly does unauthorized stuff with it increases prices of all the stuff you buy by roughly 2-3%.
The speed of it is quick, and it also gives a good chance for wrapping things up (can we get this packed, thank-yous, goodbyes if it's a bigger group, etc).
Of course, it may also help that we have chip-and-pin and tap pretty universally, so we rarely hand our card over to anyone - having the server take the card is incredibly strange for me when I'm down in the US.
In the EU, you ask for the bill, they bring you the bill and the credit card machine, and you are charged right there at the table, where you have to sign (because you have an US Credit Card after all)
Actually it's kind of funny when you visit remote places in Europe, and the proprietors are confused because this is the first time they've rang up a US Credit card, and the machine spits out a second receipt asking them to validate the signature.
In the American model, payment is processed away from the customer and the bill is left for tip-adding after the server has left, to save the sensitibilities of cheap customers who tip badly.
Also, I thought tipping itself isn't necessary, as many european countries have social programs to offset low wages.
Imagine going out with some clients and getting "insufficient funds" notice what an embarrassment that would be...the waiter acts as a buffer or could in some cases get your attention.
But your definitely right from a security perspective and privacy this is much better...other than the insane fees they collect :)
I don't. I creates an opportunity for credit card skimming.
And finally, I don't know if a skimmer has been added to the device by previous customers. It is left on the table.
[1] General neutral term for waiter/waitress.
Or, if you don't want to sound like you are describing a robot using a term Merriam-Webster describes as “vaguely disparaging” [0], you could use the gender neutral term almost universally used in the industry, “server”.
I know Clover has a similar terminal that I've seen used in restaurants around Seattle, and if you go to a restaurant outside of the US, you'd likely see what's being proposed here.