The other day, as I waited in line at the store to pay for my Halloween candy, the woman at the front of the line was more than a bit confused.
She had tried to swipe her debit card at the point-of-sale terminal several times, and it wasn't working. The cashier kept trying to explain to her that it wasn't working because she has a chip card. It took several tries for the cashier to even get her to put the card into the proper slot—and then another several tries to get her to leave the card in the slot for the duration of the transaction, instead of just putting it in and immediately taking it back out.
Both the customer and cashier were frazzled by the end of the transaction, and the line was getting longer. The man behind me asked what the hold-up was. I explained that the customer either didn't realize she was using a chip card, or she didn't understand that a chip card has to be scanned differently.
The man said, "wait a minute, I have a chip card, and I just bought something with it at the grocery store, and it worked just the same as always."
"That," I said, "is because not all of the merchants have upgraded their equipment, so even though you have a chip card, that doesn't mean you're using it as a chip card everywhere you go, yet."
Well, he thought that was pretty stupid. "You'd think they'd want to prevent stuff like what happened at Target," he said.
"You'd like to think so, wouldn't you," I replied. "But actually, using a chip card wouldn't have prevented the Target breach or any of those other big breaches."
The man's jaw just dropped. "Then what was the point?"
Fortunately, it was my turn at the register, so I just shrugged my shoulders, conducted my transaction and moved on, rather than get into a whole dialogue about EMV.
But watching that woman get increasingly frustrated as she tried to make her purchase, and the incredulous look on that man's face made something very clear to me: the much-anticipated EMV shift has happened, but many consumers have no idea what that does—and doesn't—mean.
I imagine, many of our readers—feel pretty well EMVed out. But I'd hazard the guess that many of your members aren't.
Editor in Chief Lisa Freeman can be reached at
