The first Black Friday in the U.S. since the mass introduction of credit and debit cards with chips promises to baffle shoppers who find some stores using the new technology and others accepting only swipes.
While the recent switch to the model of payment long used in Europe is meant to cut down on fraud, it also threatens to lengthen checkout times by as much as 30 seconds per customer. On the day after Thanksgiving, when thousands of people are looking for deals, it could create logjams. Some merchants fear customers will get so frustrated they’ll leave the store.
Half of U.S. retailers will have installed the equipment necessary to accept chip cards by year-end, but only 20 percent will have turned on the functionality, according to Mercator Advisory Group. That’s created a hodgepodge system that’s bound to sow confusion at the mall during the most critical sales period for retail companies.
“None of them wanted to risk messing anything up for the holiday season,” said Alex Johnson, a senior analyst at Mercator, a payments and banking industry advisory firm.
Target Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy’s Inc. and Home Depot Inc. all said they’ve trained employees to make sure customers insert their cards and keep them in the terminal for the duration of a transaction. But at other stores, including most Cinnabon units, Nordstrom Inc., Panda Express restaurants, Panera Bread Co. and Whole Foods Market Inc., shoppers will still need to swipe.
“I can just imagine a consumer on Black Friday, they go to Target first and they try to swipe the card, and they say, ‘No, you got to insert it,” ‘ Johnson said. “They go into another store, try to dip the card, they say, ‘We haven’t turned it on yet.’ There’s going to be a lot of inconsistency that’s going to slow down the whole process.”
Many retailers delayed the introduction because of the experiences of users like Elise DeHart, 27, an operations manager in Portland, Oregon. She tried her new debit card with a chip at a Target store in Portland, Oregon, last month, and ended up frustrated.
“It took five times to get it to run,” she said. “It takes longer than sliding it. They are not very convenient.”
Used in Europe since the 1990s, credit and debit cards with embedded chips are finally available in the U.S. after years of delays, and retailers are spending about $30 billion to install the compatible equipment, according to the National Retail Federation. The technology makes it more difficult for criminals to clone stolen cards compared with those with magnetic stripes only. That could help limit the fallout from retail hacks, such as the massive breach at Target in 2013.
Yet the Oct. 1 deadline that Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and other credit-card networks set for most merchants was ill-timed, just ahead of the holiday season, which accounts for 19 percent of retailers’ $3.2 trillion in annual sales, according to the NRF.
