I think it's insane that Long John Silver's stlll doesn't take chip. Maybe that's one reason they are going down?
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Kroger Begins Accepting Apple Pay at All Ralphs Grocery Stores in California
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As someone who's eaten there a couple of times, I think it's the bad food that's causing them to go down more than anything else. I don't even know if there are any around here anymore; the one that I knew about closed and I think became something else.
I've always loved them. There's 500,000 chicken/burger place to the point of all being nearly the same, but zero fast food fish. Closest now would be like 50m for Arthur Treacher's or there might be a LJS that far, but you can never trust the Internet. Some still show open but are obviouskly closed when you go
I wouldn’t call that an ability, that’s just plain laziness. Not wanting to sacrifice a tiny bit of POS integration in favor of security is simply lazy. Furthermore, there’s no benefit in having a chip reader if it’s wired and it’s located in the kitchen or the back of the restaurant where the customers can’t come to pay. It defeats the purpose of upgrading to chip, which is added security. If POS integration was more important than security, all those restaurants might as well have stayed on magnetic stripe and saved their money. Or even go cash only. They wasted their money.
I just checked their site and it seems that there are still two in my county that are also KFC locations. Unfortunately that probably means they're using KFC's POS so they'd likely accept tap if I ever went to one of them. The closest location that's only a LJS is 100+ miles away.
I mean, ideally they would have done the wireless terminal thing but accepting chip at all is still better than swiping; the chip itself makes cloning cards much harder, after all. Besides, it's fairly straightforward to move one server station to the front if it ever became necessary to have something customer-facing (government imposed PIN mandate, enough people asking to pay with their phones, etc.) Not to mention they'd have to accept chip by ~2028 anyway due to magstripe going away.
Closest the site says is Lansdale. The one we went to lately i think was MD on the way back for WV State Fair. I think one issue with some of the closed LJS here is like other fast food. Lazy workers don't want to follow hold times. They make a ton of food and wander off, and then serve nasty overheated food. Any fast food I like is always great freah.
It is not about “customer security”, the customer does not risk much except a small amount of inconvenience on a very rare occasion.
That is not really accurate. Credit cards did not have the same level of acceptance in the rest of the world as they did here in the U.S. Almost every restaurant in the U.S. has taken credit cards for many years, where as in much of the rest of the world, they only started with credit card systems once wireless terminals were the norm.
It is not an either/or as many of the U.S. mobile terminals integrate with restaurant POS systems. The ones at our neighborhood restaurants all do.
It is about customer security. The card being taken out if the owner’s sight always poses some security risk, even if it’s small.
As for POS integration, it IS either/or. There is always the option to use a standalone wireless card reader and then manually record the payments at the waiter’s station, just as a cash payment would have to be recorded. That’s what restaurants in most of the world had to to in order to quickly start processing payments at the tables. In the US they refused to do that. To them, POS integration mattered more than providing customers a more secure payment experience.
Personally, there are convenience advantages to being able to pay at the table with some sort of wireless card reader. At the same time, I can see how that would be off-putting to others. Especially since most people's only experience with that concept is the tablets at e.g. Applebee's, which are there more to make more sales for the company than to provide any convenience to customers.
It seems that the risk currently doesn't outweigh the potential customer backlash for most of them, hence why cards are mostly still taken away (and if there's some sort of pay at the table solution being used at all, it's typically some sort of QR/web portal based thing you have to scan with your phone).
I like the kiosks better than QR because they are more than just payment. You can put in app and drink orders right away and get help if you need without try to catch them as they whiz pass. And then they wouldn't have to keep checking since they'd see wherever it shows the customer needs something. Seems some are moving to QR though like Applebees.
Something QR based should be able to support orders as well. I definitely remember being at places that did, anyway.
I've seen places with digital menus through QR but not where I could order anything.
It seems like the use of wireless card readers at restaurants is just one more thing that will never happen in the US. Like the adoption of metric system, the use of chip card operated payphones, the use of tetra-brick packaging for milk and other drinks, or the use of a CPP scheme for cellphones. All those things have existed outside the US for a long time, but never made it to the US. The wireless terminals at restaurants will simply be one more thing in use everywhere but the US.
The payphone thing isn't really relevant anymore, not to mention that in practice almost no post-paid phone plan has less than unlimited minutes (assuming CPP = Calling Party Pays as I'm seeing on Google). I've also seen packaging that's similar to Tetra Brik's, so it's not like it's completely nonexistent.
Oh, and pay at the table does exist in the US. While the form commonly used elsewhere may never become common here, it's not like we will never do some form of it. I'm thinking the QR based approach will end up becoming the standard way that it's done eventually but we'll see.
Yes that was what I meant by cpp. calling party pays. And postpaid plans with limited minutes still exist in the US, as does prepaid cellular service, so not having cpp (which is extremely outdated) still affects a noticeable number of people. As for tetra-brik, what you have in the US is containers that look like tetra-brik on the outside, but actually lack the properties of tetra-brik. One of those properties is that the product does not need refrigeration until it’s opened for the first time (similar to canning). This allows supermarkets to have a greater stock of milk or juices since they can be stored anywhere, and cut costs of refrigeration. And because the packaging used in the US isn’t tetra-brik, US supermarkets always need have the milk refrigerated, for example, while supermarkets elsewhere don’t need to because the milk is actually packaged in tetra-brik.
As for pay-at-the-table, that’s exactly what I meant: the form used elsewhere may never be used in the US at all.
Even prepaid is mainly marketed by the amount of data the plan offers these days, at least on the major carriers. I'm not sure this is as big of an issue as you think given how people use their phones now. (BTW, we can thank Apple for killing a lot of the BS that carriers used to do prior to the iPhone.)
I suspect there are other food safety/legal aspects in play too, but I don't pretend to know anything about those. Regardless, not the biggest concern at the moment with everything else going on.
The fact that there are some that do means that it's already here. The question now is to what degree, and I think there's a fair consensus in this thread that it won't nearly be as common as elsewhere.
There are a lot of restaurants that have pay at the table. Maybe not wireless terminals, but tablets or QR codes.
Applebees - 1700+
Chilis - 1600
Red Lobster - 749
Olive Garden - 900
Buffalo Wild Wings - 1200+
Red Robin 500+
Abuelos - 37
Smokey Bones - 61
Denny's - 1700
Outback - 1300
Cracker Barrell - 600+
I forgot to add,
Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen - 171
On the Border - 150
Margaritaville - 30
All told that means that there are at least 1100 resturant locations that use tablets. And that's just the ones that are in a press release from the tablet companies, but I bet there are a lot more that they don't mention.
Applebees - 1700+
Chilis - 1600
Red Lobster - 749
Olive Garden - 900
Buffalo Wild Wings - 1200+
Red Robin 500+
Abuelos - 37
Smokey Bones - 61
Denny's - 1700
Outback - 1300
Cracker Barrell - 600+
I forgot to add,
Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen - 171
On the Border - 150
Margaritaville - 30
All told that means that there are at least 1100 resturant locations that use tablets. And that's just the ones that are in a press release from the tablet companies, but I bet there are a lot more that they don't mention.
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There are a lot more that don’t. Just go to any mid-tier or high end restaurant and they usually offer no option but to take your card away. Examples of this are Landrys, Rainforest Cafe, McCormick & Schmick, Carabbas, Mortons, Capital Grille, Ruth & Chris steakhouse, Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory, Willie G’s, Houston’s/Hillstone, The Oceanaire, Saltgrass steak house, Trulucks, etc. Not to mention practically every single mid-tier or high end restaurant that’s not part of a chain. Heck, even Outback, which you just mentioned as having tablets is backtracking: they’re removing the tablets at many of their locations and going back to taking cards away.
There can be no doubt that taking the cards away, as was done in 1999, is still the norm at restaurants in the US while it has long since been abandoned in the rest of the world.
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FYI Outback uses QR codes for those who want to pay at the table (and it supposedly supports Apple Pay, too).
There are advantages and disadvantages. I prefer it (as it makes it much easier to use ApplePay), but one inconvenience is that it can take longer as there are a limited number of the readers and it means that a server has to move them around the restaurant, whereas a server can drop five checks that just need signatures and tip much more quickly than having to wait as each customer completes the process.
One issue I have seen is how these devices deal with entering tips as with the reader the server is often standing there watching while one enters the tip vs. writing it on the check and enclosing it in the sleeve.
Yes, those tablets had advantages (one could order more drinks without waiting for a server), but often felt like pure upsell.
Again, security is just not really an important issue, as evidenced by the lack of adoption. If servers/restaurant personnel stealing credit card numbers was a big issue, card issuers would have long since changed the rules to require table side processing.
Europe adopted table side processing because debit cards not used as credit cards were much more common than credit cards and they required entering PINs. Once one is already entering a PIN for a debit card transaction, entering a PIN for a credit card transaction is easy and given that requirement table side processing is obvious.
This, and I don’t care for it at all. Worse, the default tip is usually 20% or 25%. So while the server is watching I select “No Tip” and return it to the server saying that I always leave a cash tip, which I then do. Servers in restaurants we frequent know this and also know I tip pretty well for truly excellent service (in MY opinion, not theirs). Exception is for a reimbursable business expense where the tip goes on the card as well.
Handwriting the tip on the check is outdated. Furthermore, doing that means the tip will need to be adjusted by the staff at a later time and that leaves the risk of being charged more than one actually authorized. It’s safer to have the tip added on the wireless card reader right before actually charging the card, leaving no need for a later adjustment. But americans are stubborn and their sit down restaurants simply won’t ever change. Anyone who doesn’t like their outdated methods, just don’t go to any sit down restaurants when you visit the US. It’s america: love it or leave it, but don’t ever expect it to change.
Oh, it will change over time. POS vendors are pushing NFC and QR codes at tables and when the equipment breaks, which it will eventually, they will be pushed to getting better stuff by the vendors. Studies have shown increases in sales for resturants that use pay at the table systems.
Sure, but if they can get those same gains with something QR based, they're going to go with that--especially since there's a lot smaller of an investment required vs. actually having wireless devices that servers carry around.
Plus, the banks really only care that contactless/Apple Pay is getting used at all, not necessarily that the customer is the one tapping. If that means that restaurant servers tap customers' physical cards for them in the back (with some smaller fraction of people who are wanting to use Apple Pay simply using the restaurant's QR code interface instead), so be it. In fact, banks may eventually end up preferring physical cards be tapped to avoid Apple's 0.15% cut, even if it is ultimately a downgrade in security.
Depending on how much the restaurant trusts their customers, they could just start leaving the terminals at the tables while the customers interact with them. It'd probably help with the tipping issue, too, along with freeing up servers to handle non-payment tasks at other tables.
Unfortunately, there's either a low level of trust and/or still a desire to handle cards for customers as the server tends to insert at the few places that do pay at the table in my experience (with the only customer interaction being the tip prompt/signature).
If you're mandating PIN for cards, that kinda solves the problem without needing to specifically mandate pay at the table. Plus, in other chip and signature markets (Mexico prior to their transition to PIN, for example), there actually was a mandate for pay at the table, so at least those places saw some sort of security benefit.