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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

As a european who has always had chip cards, it has never happened to me[0] that the reader failed to read the chip. Granted, I don't use the card very often, but I would say in the last 10 ten years I have probably used it a few hundred times. Chip & signature, is usually slower.

OTOH, NFC credit cards are now also becoming more common in europe too, i.e. https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/

[0] EDIT: it might have happened and I can't remember it, which is effectively the same thing in context.

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You assume too much. I am from the UK, and the chip failing to read is a common occurrence, and some readers are well known bad (e.g. the cashier will be like "yeah it has been doing that all day" as you spit and polish the chip contacts).

But I do use my card(s) a great deal. So much so that the contacts on the chip are changing from gold to brown.

Yeah, thanks to your post, I'm not looking forward to chips becoming more popular in the US.

I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Only times I've had a swipe fail has been when I mis-swiped the card, and that's entirely on my own klutziness, not any kind of mechanical failure.

The future shouldn't be worse than the present, but it looks like that's the road we're going down...

I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down.

Although it seems less common over the last several years (perhaps because now physical cards are often replaced several times before they nominally expire?), this used to be a serious problem. The most common fix for a read failure was to put the card inside a plastic grocery bag, pull the bag tight, and then reswipe it. I have no idea how this fixed anything, but I witnessed it working many times.

Once you've worn the contacts away you can hardly call them contacts any more (and it's unsurprising they fail regularly). Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better.

> Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better.

My mum is a cachier. It is a constant headache where she works. Some tills the staff avoid using until last because the reader sucks so bad.

But, to you, C&P is an infallible technology that doesn't comfort to our normal rules of physics, so I'm sure nothing will convince you.

A gentle lady on the cashier once took card out of my hands and rubbed on her hair. It worked lol.

If you can find them anymore (and care enough), the pink pencil erasers are good too; they are very slightly abrasive, but not so much as to remove a layer of metal.

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