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Comment by travem | Hacker News Reader

One thing I would like is the ability to pay at the table. Moving from the UK where the waitstaff brought the card reader to the table for you (to pay with chip-and-pin) to the US where waitstaff I had met for the first time disappeared with my credit card for several minutes was unnerving at first.

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Completely agree. I just came back from Istanbul and they use the mobile card readers everywhere. Every bar/restaurant tab was cleared in seconds despite there being 6+ people in our group. This was new to me as an American who had not used them before. I wonder why these aren't being used in the US as they are easier and probably more secure than the current system of signature-matching.

Yeah, that's the biggest advantage for me. Once I'm done eating I generally want to at least go outside to smoke/vape, if not leave right away, but far too often it takes a solid 20 minutes to wait for the bill to arrive, wait for the waiter to return the bill, and then wait for them to return with my card. When I've used one of these systems, we finished eating, I swiped my card, and then we left.

Plus, the one I used had the ability to arbitrarily split the check without having to have the waiter remember the random dollar amounts to put on 4 different cards.

Once you guys are forced to switch to chipcard readers, you'll have wireless readers everywhere. This is how it happened in Canada in recently years.

This will have to happen with chip and pin cards anyway.

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