> Swiping and signing is heck of a lot faster than figuring out which to insert the card in this particular terminal
Well, there's always the issue of unfamiliar terminals, but that's a question of habit. I, for one, can complete a chip+pin transaction faster than most terminals can print a slip for signing.
What country are you in? The machines in Zurich pretty much always take 8-10 seconds just to get around to asking for a PIN, then a further 5 seconds to confirm. This, in a reasonably wired city where both my bank and the merchant's bank are a couple blocks down the street. At grocery stores in North America, I usually swipe the card, sign the screen, and have a receipt in under 5 seconds.
The screen-signing solution is very fast - I was talking about paper-signing.
I'm in the UK now, but I'm talking about Denmark. I'm probably pretty biased by my experience with my Danish chip-card that still requires a signature here. I'm often asked by confused checkout assistants if I have a pen. Not fast.
In the beginning, when the chip-cards were rolled out in Denmark, they were very slow, on the scale of what you're describing, but it's much faster now.
Agreed, most terminals I use are pretty quick - certainly a lot faster than waiting for a bit of paper to be printed, singing it and then the bits of paper torn apart.
Well, there's always the issue of unfamiliar terminals, but that's a question of habit. I, for one, can complete a chip+pin transaction faster than most terminals can print a slip for signing.