The death of the signature is not so much an acute cardiac event as a slow decline \u2014 one led, Manning says, by merchants themselves. The problem with signatures, besides general inefficacy, is that they are cumbersome (merchants have to store their copies somewhere) and slow. For smaller transactions, he says, it made more sense for merchants to eat the occasional cost of a disputed transaction than to slow down the line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe fast-food industry was clamoring to have swipe-based, non-signature-based transactions, because [signing] was slowing down the line. Even if it was as little as 30 seconds, you multiply that by hundreds of people, and it was a huge cost savings for them in terms of manpower,\u201d he says. And so a threshold emerged: Starting around 2010, according to the Times, credit card networks stopped requiring signatures on purchases under $25 or $50, although it was up to individual merchants whether to take advantage of the revised policy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many did not. \u201cThe jumble of rules about which transactions required signatures and which did not \u2014 every issuer has its own policies \u2014 discouraged many merchants, especially smaller ones, from scrapping signatures altogether,\u201d explained the Times<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then came April 2018, when Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and Discover agreed they would no longer require signatures at the point of any sale. (The rules of each network are slightly different: Visa doesn\u2019t require signatures in North America, but only for merchants with payment systems that read chip cards; Mastercard is ditching signatures, but only in the US and Canada.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe change is part of Discover\u2019s efforts to continually improve the payment experience by speeding up the time spent at checkout all while maintaining a high level of security for both customers and merchants,\u201d a representative for the company wrote me (by email, no signature), citing a number of \u201cdigital authentication technologies\u201d that have replaced our indistinguishable scribbles. \u201cWith the rise in new payment security capabilities, like chip technology and tokenization, the time was right to remove this step from the checkout experience.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Until relatively recently, the US checkout experience was not good. You might even say it was bad; at Vox, Timothy B. Lee termed it \u201cold and busted<\/a>.\u201d Until 2015, in the US, you made in-person credit card purchases by swiping a magnetic strip on your card, which, Lee explains, contains \u201ca machine-readable version of the same information that\u2019s printed on the card itself: the account number, account holder\u2019s name, and the card expiration date.\u201d But this meant you were sharing your data with everyone, all the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, the US caught on to what Europe and Asia already knew, and transitioned away from strips to chips. Chip cards, the current standard, contain a tiny computer chip that creates a one-off code for every transaction<\/a>. But while other countries use \u201cchip and PIN\u201d technology, which pairs the chip with a debit card-esque personal identification number, the US transitioned to a chip-and-signature system. We just love signing things here; after football, it is our national pastime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tokenization, meanwhile, is what happens when you use something like Apple Pay, which instead of using your actual credit card number creates a \u201cstring of seemingly nonsensical letters and numbers\u201d representing<\/em> your credit card number, NerdWallet explains<\/a>. It is drastically more secure than signing your name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that several major credit card networks no longer require signatures \u2014 and the fact that more and more shopping is happening online, where signatures are not required anyway \u2014 has not changed the reality that a lot of us are still signing a lot of receipts. Small receipts, even! <\/p>\n\n\n\n I bring my concerns to Discover (I do not have a Discover card). \u201cKeep in mind that while Discover does not require signatures anymore, merchants may decide to still require one when customers are checking out,\u201d the rep <\/strong>tells me, adding that if merchants want to transition away from signatures, they \u201cmay need to update their point of sale systems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is the answer to this mystery that my merchants just haven\u2019t updated their sale systems yet? \u201cThe vast majority of merchants have gone along with the networks and said no more signing,\u201d Rossman says, with one categorical exception: bars and restaurants, which still commonly ask for signatures. \u201cYou\u2019re leaving a tip that changes the bill,\u201d which, he says, is \u201cdifferent than signing for something with a fixed price.\u201d The fact that you\u2019re changing the total after the fact is \u201ca big part of why they still want you to sign.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\nSo why are you still constantly signing things?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n