Chip-and-pin retail chaos looms

While this [C&P] does have disaster written all over it, I am rather more confident about it than I was two weeks ago, having seen just how badly implemented the US version of C&P is. The logic of C&P is that retail staff don't provide an adequate check of the card's signature [true, particularly in the US where clerks often never look at same] with the signature on the receipt, and so an alternative has to be found which forces the consumer to more accurately identify themselves - hence the need to enter a PIN number.

Now half of this problem could have been solved if more card issuers had just put people's pictures on the cards, but that was too simple. So now we will have to constantly use our PIN numbers if we want to buy anything in the UK, which is almost guaranteed to make it easier for other people to steal same, and since it will be much more difficult to prove this has happened, fraud costs which were previously passed on to the retailer will now be passed onto the poor consumer. Result, if you're a bank that is.

The worst implementation of C&P [or equivalent] that I've seen so far [and it was so bad it was absolutely breathtaking] was in a Duane Reade drug store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. A woman in line in front of me paid for her purchases with a card, and was instructed to enter her PIN number on an 8" x 12" LCD touch-screen, mounted at head height in front of the cash register so that everyone standing behind her [and there were probably twenty or thirty of us] could see her tap in each number.