Do waiters really walk off with your credit card in America? I'd never want to let my credit card out of my sight, let alone let some guy I don't know take it from me
This is also has the advantage that if for whatever reason it is impossible to pay because all the servers have disappeared and no is up front, you can just calculate out the bill+tax+tip from the prices in the menu, lay it on the table, and leave.
Most the problems around credit/phones revolve around the fact that restaurants are operating around customs and inertia of the cash system, and awkwardly injecting other collection methods into this routine, personally I don't bother fighting it.
What two sides are you referencing? I can't fathom that customers is one of those sides. Cash is just about my least preferred method, maybe second only to writing a check.
1 - https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/statistics-for-cash-and...
I do carry cash, and probably use cash more than someone younger would, but for restaurant bills beyond the burger and brew range I tend to use a credit card. Once one gets into the white-tablecloth world, bills are beyond the amount of cash I usually carry.
Some places still do, but most places I've been to post-pandemic have the servers carrying handheld POS terminals and do it tableside.
For various reasons the US was very slow to adopt chip-based cards, and even when it did they were usually chip and sig. It was also slow to adopt tap to pay (likely because mobile terminals were less of a thing, because chip and pin was not a thing); it only _really_ took off when Apple and Google kinda forced the issue by putting it in phones.
I think Apple and Google released their implementations when they did exactly because the US credit card companies moved over to EMV (tap and pay) standard.
There was a “liability shift” [1] that happened nearly a decade ago after many high profile card database leakage events (target retail stores being one).
The shift was that instead of credit card companies always accepting the liability for stolen cards, the policies were changed so that retailers that still used magnetic stripes would have to accept liability (because with magnetic stripes, the same card number is used everywhere). Or they could avoid it by moving to chip and wireless readers, since these protocols used a different virtual card number for every transaction.
As card holders, we all started getting our banks sending us new chip and wireless cards before Apple Pay came out.
1: https://squareup.com/us/en/the-bottom-line/operating-your-bu...
That's not what EMV is, or, at least, while most tap and pay cards are EMV (besides some 90s oddities in Europe), EMV long predates tap and pay (it's from the 1980s).
Most US cards were EMV (chip and sig, usually, not chip and pin), _long_ before Apple/Google Pay came out, but usually did not support tap to pay, which is a separate standard also falling under EMV (the terminology is kinda unhelpful).
For most of recorded human history literacy was rare. A typical Roman citizen could not read, certainly beyond the ability to understand a handful of marks or make their name. By the nineteenth century it is entirely unremarkable that Patrick Brontë's daughters are taught to read and write, but it is also entirely unremarkable that several of them† died of TB since at the time we didn't know a cure for it.
† It's contested whether, for example, Charlotte died of TB, it probably didn't help.