Banking in the US is like going back in time 20 years. Even when I flew through Dallas and LAX during the height of COVID I had to hand my credit card over for someone to swipe, then pickup a pen that thousands of others had touched to sign a piece of paper. I've been tapping to pay exclusively for years and forgot about all that ancient stuff.
Most developed countries I'm familiar with made cheap/free wire transfers the most fundamental banking product decades ago. The change was driven by the banks, because handling checks was expensive and there was too much fraud involved. The US never made the change, probably because there were too many banks that could not agree on anything. That doesn't matter much anymore, because online card payments and ACH transfers (which are technically not wire transfers) are prevalent.
Another thing that contributes to the perception of backwardness is that American credit card issuers never adopted chip and PIN like the rest of the developed world. Elsewhere, banks wanted to reduce fraud and accepted the need to remember PINs as a small price for that. In the US, banks could afford more fraud due to higher fees, and they chose convenience instead. But today, cards have chips without a PIN anyway, and swiping is used mostly as a rare fallback mechanism. And apps such as Apple Pay and Google Pay (or whatever it's called this week) are quickly removing the need for physical cards.
It's really not.
Just the other day, I had to pay for gas at a station that still used swipe rather than chip, and then ate at an outdoor café where I had to give my card to the server, who took it away and brought back a sheet to sign and a pen.
A lot of places are updating to handle chip and tap-to-pay, which is great, but until swipe entry is completely obsoleted and non-portable terminals for restaurants are banned by the payment processors, there will still be some who hold on because that's what they have and what they know.
Bring your own pen. It is presumed that you bring around a few essentials.
Edit: on the other hand (pun unintended), some operations of electronic money transfer here require people signing on tablets through pens that are of common use and will more hardly be replaced by an owned item.
Much of the western world is near-digital at this point.
I handwrite things so rarely these days that my handwriting has reverted back to year 6 level.
Don't blame it on the "West". I have rights to blame my rage on the "west". There are no rights to blame what you are not forced to (in this case, e.g. that you abandoned doing math and solving through state-of-the-art "wits hand stick and surface").
Nonetheless, we were talking about signatures.
> «Essentials»
With «essentials» of course I meant something that you carry around because you know you may need it owing to the environment - not a absolute personal need (as in "I will take notes"), but a relative contextual need (as in "either I bring mine or I will have to share").