Friday, February 1, 2013

Charge it.

Add to Google Reader or HomepageA small observation: in France, purchases made by credit card are completed without the card ever leaving your sight. Be it in a restaurant or a shop, the system feels more secure than the ways we transact business with credit cards in the states. In France, all of the restaurant servers have hand-held credit card swipe machines. They bring you the bill and, when you are ready to pay, they return with a wireless credit card swipe machine. You watch the restaurant server swipe the card and generate the printout(s) which s/he gives to you along with your credit card. (Retail shops operate much as they do in the states with credit card swipe machines located at the check-out counter.)

Giving my credit card to a server in an American restaurant might explain my heretofore undefined discomfort as I watch the server disappear with my credit card only to return X minutes later with a print-out to review and sign.

As we grow more concerned about identify theft, it seems like we should have the same wireless credit card machines in the US. – Or, maybe my anxiety is misplaced and I should be more concerned about wireless data transmission and hackers???