I've never had trouble buying train tickets with a credit card in Germany. If I had to guess, your issue was that you were trying to use a card that didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.
Two years back the S-bahn ticket machines at the aiport only supported chip+pin, not contactless. Had to open my banking app to figure out my pin code, as I wanted to use my corporate Amex
Chip and signature, which often means just the chip without further authentication.
EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the US) chose the signature option for credit cards for convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before contactless payment apps became common, that was a major source of friction when using American credit cards in Europe.
I'd argue we picked it for legacy reasons - Americans are not used to the chip/pin concept, and adopted EMV very late because of a variety of legacy reasons (massive installed base of mag stripe equipment, and systems to deal with the inherent slightly higher fraud).
No the US stuck with signature for profit and cultural reasons. Europe also had a huge install of mag stripe equipment, and has the same fraud systems, what else do you think Europe was using before EMV was developed?
But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.
The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.
The legacy reasons are part of why we waited so long to adopt EMV - my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I dont disagree with you about interchange rates etc - we should cap them - but as a high earner I'm also going to maximize what I can from that system while I can ;-)
Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).
> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.
Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.
My point is we (in north america) often seem retain outdated technology because of early adopter problems - be it the T1 vs E1 conversation, how credit cards are processed, all of it. We tend to adopt V1 of a technology and have too much of an installed base to easily adopt the considerably improved V2.
And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.
Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.
In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
Both my DNB and Nordea cards, as well as my personal and corporate Norwegian AMEX cards all have magnetic strip, and they’ve all been issued somewhat recently.
I’ve never received a debit or credit card in Norway without a magstrip. One of the points of having one is to use it in places abroad where chip or contactless isn’t implemented. It’s become thinner but the stipe is still there.
Prepaid gift cards (please note: those are not store issued) dont have chips and it is sometimes a problem to use them. But I doubt someone would buy a plane ticket with them.
I am not sure if it counts as a debit or credit card, because from technology point of view the division is blurry.
They are perhaps prepaid debit cards.
But you can change and set a pin on them just like on the old credit cards. Because that's what they are - old technology.
They dont have a chip, so you have to swipe them.
Some employers give those gift cards instead of cash and I think those cards use the older technology in order to be cheaper (the chip costs few cents to manufacture). After you clear your card balance you basically throw the card away (very ecological), but if they wanted they can also add more money to the same card again. They usually dont do it since people lose the cards, so they issue new ones. So you get a lot of plastic.
Think of this as some pocket money every 3-6 months.
It says VISA on the card.
The companies could give cash, but due to some obscure law and psychological reasons they give cards. The card is still better than the paper sodexo gift cards they would give out years ago that were a pain to use since few shops accepted them.
But still it is a pain, since you often end up with a small balance and you need to pay part with this gift card (to clean it up to zero) and part with cash.
Perhaps this is to facilitate the transition towards a cashless society and to provide the bundle of social benefits that companies advertise to stay competitive in the market and attract employees. Just like company shares or RSUs.
If this story was more than a few years ago it's plausible that the card didn't have a chip. I still have a VISA debit card without a chip, and it was issued only two years ago.
Also chip-and-pin is mostly not enabled with American credit cards or card payment terminals
