In Canada, I haven’t seen a credit card taken by the waiter for payment since maybe the late 90s. However, the dozens of times that I’ve gone to a sit-down restaurant in the States, I have not once had a waiter bring the machine to the table. Having the machine brought over is much faster and convenient, and allows the customer to be sure of what is charged, so why hasn’t this caught on?
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A lot of places in the US bring the wireless machine to your table or sometimes have a little touchscreen thing already on the table that allows you to pay (Chili’s). At one spot I went to recently, they had a QR code where you can just pay online.
Something not mentioned: if you’re at a *nice* restaurant, it will feel kind of cheesy. I think if the culture changes that perception might as well, but I would anticipate fine dining to be the last hold out.
Because most restaurants have exactly 1 machine that is wired and sitting next to the cash register. Paying for better systems costs money, and a lot of places are renting the equipment they have now. Paying even more for an updated system will cost more than they’re willing to spend.
In the US, it’s more common for them to bring the credit card machine to you nowadays, but not overwhelmingly so. Honestly I’d rather not have them looming over me. It makes me feel like I have to hurry up, instead of taking my time to make sure the bill is calculated correctly. And it feels like they want you to hurry up and select one of the high tip options. I’m not worried about credit card fraud bc I have instant alerts about any transactions. Many places can have you pay with the QR code which avoids the need for a portable credit card machine and having to loom over you.
They do many times, but the reason restaurants in the United States never got into the habit of doing that. Is that for decades you couldn’t move the credit card machine. Joe, we have this expectation that at the end of a meal your check will come and then you will lay your credit card down and then the server will take it away and then they will bring it back. That is the order of events.
There are plenty of places now that bring the machine to your table, but they tend to be smaller or trendier places because the idea of taking your car away and bringing it back is still thought of as part of the fine dining experience. Because it was for decades.
High end bougie white tablecloth places consider the whole payment thing gauche, something to be handled at the wait station or the bar, away from diners.
In the US, merchants are not responsible for fraudulent credit card transactions. So as a result, they have little to no incentive to buy a brand new, more secure credit card reader.
Many restaurants therefore still operate on their first ever card reader that they got decades ago, sitting on their front desk.
This is also the reason why so many places still swipe instead of using tap/chip.
Early adopter issue. The US reached near-universal cc acceptance earlier, but the cost of that was doing it with an older system (both human systems and computers systems). And now that newer options are available… there just isn’t enough pressure to update just to update.
What do they do if your card is a “digital card” on your phone?
Do they take your phone and your finger/eye/face in case it times-out before they can bump the phone on the terminal for a frottage transaction?
While we’re at it, why do they not have e-transfers in the states? It’s such a foreign concept to me that people use apps like Cashapp and Venmo. In Canada (and I assume most other developed countries) we can just directly transfer money to whomever we want through our bank apps.
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