I'm glad the cashiers in your country took it that well!

I've heard of a few cases of surprised employees getting suspicious or outright hostile in the early Apple Pay days (when it wasn't available to domestic cardholders yet and only tourists would use it)

This might be largely due to a strong culture of cashiers expecting to be handed over your card and them being the ones to insert it into the terminal (which is quite ridiculous – it causes the terminal to be pivoted between cashier and customer twice for each transaction for the mandatory PIN entry).