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Comment by weaksauce | Hacker News Reader

unless it's changed recently that only applies to tap and chip payments (which you should always prefer to avoid card skimmers) and not the old slide the ~~barcode~~ magnetic strip kinda payment.

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Does anyone still use the magnetic strip? I think it's been over a decade since I've seen a credit card without the chip, and terminals have been able to read the chip since forever. I think the last few times a store tried to use the magnetic strip on my card (because the chip failed to read due to a bad contact), the transaction was simply rejected due to not using the chip.

2 times just this week I was asked to swipe, “issues with the chip reader” (CVS and Wegmans)

That's wild to me, the last time I had to swipe my card here in Australia was sometime in the early 2010s!

Heck a lot of the terminals here can't swipe a card at all

Seems surprising to me. I've not swiped a UK card in many years. Honestly can't remember the last time.

It's curious you're seeing so many stripe fallback incidents. Is this a USA issue?

possibly, can’t recall having any issues in europe where I reside over the summer.

USA was very late to adopt chip/tap terminals, even relative to Canada. I could be wrong but IIRC it was only when Apple Pay came along that tap-enabled terminals began to hit critical mass.

It's always incredible to see few people in the US uses the tech that's available until Apple makes it a thing, and seeing that play out over and over.

This is the same everywhere though. See, e.g. incredibly late fibre rollout in many well off EU countries because they already had copper in the ground everywhere vs. developing countries that never had that legacy infrastructure inertia.

What I'm talking about is a lot of those terminals supported tap to pay well before Apple Pay became a thing. The infrastructure was there, the technology was there, you could use it if you cared to do so. Most people just didn't know it was even an option. Google Wallet supported tap to pay years before Apple Pay was even announced. Tap to pay credit cards existed years before then. Nobody gave a shit about the technology until Apple announced Apple Pay and suddenly it became a big deal for vendors to actually check if their POS systems had it enabled or not.

I remember using Google Wallet years before Apple pay existed. When Apple Pay was announced so many cashiers thought they didn't support tap to pay credit card transactions despite me using it at those locations for years. What was really annoying was a lot of vendors turned off the feature while they "investigated" supporting Apple Pay, and didn't turn it back on for another year or so after they slapped the Apple Pay logo on the exact same terminals.

Nobody cared until Apple did it.

In the USA, gas station pay-at-the-pump were the last major holdouts, but it’s been a while since I saw a pump that didn’t use chip or tap to pay.

My HSA debit card, issued last year, still doesn’t have a chip.

Old automatic vending machines and old municipal parking meters still require swipes.

In some regions, credit/debit cards no longer have magnetic strips.

If I travel to the USA I'll be unable to use these old vending machines and parking meters.

I used it recently because my bank denied the contactless and chip payments I tried before that. Surprisingly the mag stripe worked - and this is with card issues from a EU bank where mag stripes have been an historical artifact much longer than in the US.

Yes, occasionally when refueling a shared car owned by a company that distributes those cars all over The Netherlands. It's common here in leased car fleets as well, where the user gets a magstripe card to refuel (and needs to provide details about current mileage and if the car was a replacement car).

> unless it's changed recently

In Europe it's changed 15-20 years ago, when EMV-capable terminals became required, and acceptance of magnetic stripe cards got phased out soon after.

Since Apple Pay became a thing a decade ago, we don't even get US tourists confused by inability to swipe their cards anymore.

Note that is for the merchant side, not for the customer side - my EU-issued card still has a working mag stripe (got a chance to verify that it works this year).

And on a tangent about confused customers - I wish where to tap was as obvious as where to swipe. It varies by reader and sometimes that contactless logo is hard to see.

Not to mention the (usually mobile) terminal designs where only the merchant sees the amount entered, usually doesn't flip it to show it to the customer, and the customer needs to tap it on their side without first seeing the amount entered.

... such as this one: https://www.paxtechnology.com/a77

“which you should always prefer to avoid card skimmers” could use a disambiguation comma between “prefer” and “to”; I misread it several times before the intended meaning clicked.

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