http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=1118988
another "hurrr americans are so backwards" 
eurotrash thread 
The title alone puts me off.
I work for a company in the payment card industry. The industry itself is a bunch of layers. The banks. The financial services companies like VISA that handle electronic funds transfers and network the banks together. The payment processors that handle the transactions. The terminal manufacturers. The merchant services companies that sell or lease terminals to businesses and provide them with customer support and access to the payment processors.
The issues, as I understand them, are primarily money and the law. The example I was given was a family owned chain of 10 gas stations. 9 two-sided pumps = 18 terminals. 3 more terminals inside the building. That's 21 per location. So, 10 locations means 210 terminals that need to be yanked out and replaced. That's a huge expense for businesses, even the ones that just have a couple of terminals. Scale that out across the entire country.
And the law. In Europe they use "chip and PIN" meaning there's a chip in the card and you enter your PIN on a keypad to authorize a payment. In the USA we're moving toward a "chip and signature" system, which means that even if you have a card with an embedded chip it still may not properly work in Europe (and vice-versa.) The difference is that in Europe the use of a PIN to authorize a payment is considered to be sufficient to absolve the bank of liability for fraud. In other words if someone steals your card and PIN and buys a bunch of stuff, you're on the hook for it. This seems somewhat crazy because PIN hacking is pretty commonplace. Which is why in the USA the law is that an authorized signature is required to absolve the bank of liability for unauthorized transactions. A PIN alone doesn't cut it.
There are other factors, too... Starbucks, for example. They're the king of electronic payments. Between those physical Starbucks cards and their smartphone app they are gigantic. They incentivize the hell out of paying with their card/app by offering free drinks, food, etc. It's much more profitable because they don't have to pay any transaction fees. All the more reason to drag their feet on replacing all of the terminals at every Starbucks location (and presumably to lobby against it, though I have no idea if that actually happens.)
