Every weekend, when Pierre Houle works the brunch shift at Olea, a neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco, many customers want to split the tab on multiple credit cards, a process that takes much longer than it used to.
For waiters like Mr. Houle, diners going Dutch is nothing new. But now he has to take each of the credit cards, insert them into a chip reader and wait about 10 seconds for every transaction to process. In the past, he could swipe a card, wait a few seconds, print out the receipt and get going.
�It isn�t much, but in the restaurant world it can be enormous,� he said. �I have to wait there, and I can�t go check on something else. You need to move all the time when you do a job like that.�
Many merchants and retail workers are watching their lives play in slow motion when they process credit cards. To combat fraudulent transactions, the retail industry is shifting away from the traditional magnetic stripe toward tiny computer chips embedded inside cards. The chip technology, known as E.M.V. (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa) has been around for decades in Europe. But starting last October in the United States, banks pushed the liability of purchases made with counterfeit credit cards onto merchants.
That means if a criminal swipes a counterfeit credit card to buy something, the merchant now has to pay for it. The sweeping change has compelled many retailers to upgrade their equipment to read chips, which have stronger security than the easy-to-forge magnetic stripe. By the end of this year, about 80 percent of all credit cards in the United States should include chips, according to a new report by the fraud prevention company Iovation and the research firm Aite Group.
The chip initially may annoy consumers. For most chip transactions, you have to dip the credit card into a slot and wait for the transaction to be approved before you can remove it and scribble your signature.
Mobile payments could be a quicker alternative. Some of the biggest tech companies � Apple, Google and Samsung Electronics � released mobile wallet technologies in the last two years, though they are still a niche product. In the United States, only 0.2 percent of all in-store sales were made with phones last year, according to a survey by eMarketer, the research firm.
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