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Comment by Chromozon | Hacker News Reader

My workplace cafeteria, located in Austin, Texas, just switched the registers to always use the chips on cards. The result: the lines are 2-3x as long, they have hired another cashier, and they have created a cash-only line in order to speed up the process. It's mind-boggling how slow the chips are. The cashiers have started doing two customers at once- while you are waiting for your card to validate, they are ringing up the next order.

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It's not the chips that are slow but the card readers, networking technology and so. The same chip works much faster in many other countries.

Maybe; but it's been ages since I've seen a swiped card transaction go that slow, and the card swipe uses the same card reader hardware, the same network technology, and the same "and so".

As far as I know US banks use the same chip standard as European banks (EMV) and in some countries those transactions are pretty fast (in others less so).

The card swipe doesn't use the same reader hardware as the chip reading (well, it is in the device) and there is more processing going on with more round trips to the bank if using the chip. Likely different parts of the software are used both at the reader and the bank as well.

Does it? I don't recall it being much faster in Ireland or The Netherlands.

They do have the nifty portable readers, though.

Maybe. I don't own a US card but heard of such stories.

But I can tell you that my German card is quite slow in Germany (not as slow as US transaction though) but blazingly fast in Sweden, Denmark, or France.

>They do have the nifty portable readers, though.

Canada has them, too, and they're great at restaurants. Great for tipping since they just hand you the device at that point with common percentage options on screen (or the option to customize it).

The American experience of server collects your card, comes back with two receipts, mental arithmetic to figure out the tip, write it down on the receipt, hand the receipt back, and server types in the tip amount just seems clunky in comparison.

In general, though, I carry cash for tips since I know those probably won't be taxed.

Clunky and also unsafe. So easy for your card to be skimmed this way.

Always amusing to see confused Americans in Canadian restaurants, though.

You're paying for food at work?

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