[email protected] (Tony Harminc) writes: > I'm not sure why this offends you so much. How would it help anything > if the cashier checked your signature? Such checking is highly > unreliable, and contributes much less to authentication than does the > data they already know about the transaction.
at one point, a large merchant looked at automatically discarding all signed receipts ... since they found that even if they automatically settled all disputes in the favor of the customer ... those dispute costs were still less than what they were paying (even in electronic from) to retain all the signed receipts. The idea was abandoned when somebody asked what might happen if the public found out that the merchant was no longer retaining the signed receipts. for the most part ... merchant associations don't like the idea of clerks having to be involved in the authentication process ... partly because they have little or no training ... partly because they have little or no authority ... and partly because clerks tend to already have more than enough to deal with. in general, merchants also don't like signature debit ... since the interchange fees (merchant discount fees, the subtracted from the total for actual paying to the merchant) are much higher there have been various disputes about the whole signature debit operation ... latest is: Best Buy Cuts off Visa Contactless with Little Risk to Sales http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=2418 above mentions problem with it being signature debit interchange fees. somewhat older article ... Study: Signature Debit Fraud Runs 15 Times Higher Than on PIN Debit http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=738 part of the interchange fee is supposedly related to fraud level of the corresponding kind of transaction ... and there can be more than an order-of-magnitude difference (in interchange fee) between the transactions with lowest fraud and transactions with highest fraud. Past merchant class action lawsuit (sometimes referred to as the "Wal-Mart" case) over the high cost of signature debit cards: MasterCard Puts the 13-Year-Old Wal-Mart Case in the Rear-View Mirror http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=2256 -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
