Retail Watchers

The Taco Bell here for a long time did not take cards with chips, despite being built in 2016. They had the slots on the card reader, but they always had a paper card in them, with a note to "swipe right." I think in the last month or so they finally started taking them. Nowhere else I know of wasn't using them.

Although the DQ didn't have the card readers until last year, they only did a swipe on the side of the POS terminal before.

It seems to be a very slow rollout with Taco Bell. Some locations are taking chip.

If you really want weird, Panda Express is weird. One location in Reno has pinpads and takes chip cards and tap; they installed the pinpads about three months ago. A new Panda Express opened about one month ago and no pinpad, the old "swipe on the register" set up. Both of these Pandas are corporate operated and use the same NCR POS systems.

I think it must cost a lot of money to take Chip cards and some of these places are just not spending the money unless they deem it necessary (store with a lot of fraud/large transactions in the case of fast food).

At DQ there doesn't seem to be any consistency between locations when it comes to payment processing. There are four DQ locations near where I live, and I think all four of them have completely different payment terminals. My guess is that it's up to the individual franchisees what they use.

That's true, since I just remembered the older DQ location here, uses the older style card reader terminal behind the counter. They don't even have POS terminals, but use cash registers like a small business. Orders have to be rung up on the register and then the amount entered on the CC terminal.

storewanderer wrote: ↑January 28th, 2019, 9:44 pm It seems to be a very slow rollout with Taco Bell. Some locations are taking chip.

Pretty much this. Taco Bell is very lenient in what they let their franchisees get away with sometimes, and the POS update for chip cards is one of them. At the same time, they have a TON of technology rollouts happening simultaneously... the Internet/wifi upgrade I worked on, digital menu boards, new POS software (for chip and contactless payments), and ordering kiosks are just some of them. Franchisees often have to will prioritize which rollouts to implement first.

The POS upgrades generally take longer. In the HQ, they have a test lab with probably two dozen different POS systems and just as many card readers they have to test their software on. For example, "POS version X" may be completed and released for Toshiba POS systems with Verifone CC terminals, but there may still be bugs on the version designed for NCR systems with another card terminal type.

Probably does make some sense that it would be less of a cost to cover a few bad cards when most people are spending a relatively small amount vs. the cost of upgrading, as opposed to a store (say Walmart) where people are charging hundreds (or even thousands) in one purchase.

Either that, or they are waiting for someone to create cards with tortilla chips

It seems that the start to accepting CC with chip here started when Taco Bell added the ordering kiosks, if not just before.

cjd wrote: ↑January 30th, 2019, 4:04 pm It seems that the start to accepting CC with chip here started when Taco Bell added the ordering kiosks, if not just before.

That sounds right. The kiosks would have likely included a full POS hardware upgrade