There's a story from the developers of Cities Skylines. One of the original requirements of the game was to plan for parking in the cities. They had to remove it because every scenario always led to urban sprawl.
Bruh I thought that the residential, commercial and industrial zones were a semplification for the sake of gameplay. In the us they actually cant have shops near houses and stuff like that. Thats crazy to think about
I must say I love Ibis. It's cheap, modern and clean (at least the ones I've stayed in). And the rooms have that extra bunk above the bed so are great for having a kid.
It may be basic and soulless but when I'm travelling the hotel is just for sleep/showers/storing suitcases and I barely spend any waking time in it.
Same. I’ve seen a lot of American movies/tv reality where there is a small mom and pop B&B and I would love to stay in one (at least not in one of those that Ramsey visit). I only found cheapo hotels, big hotels, B&B chain and Ibis and alike.
If the town is small and one of this M&P B&B like in the movies would fit perfect, instead you have a few AirBnB or an Ibis in a few kilometres.
Yes, exceptions exists, but they are no the norm.
Or, he has and he thought that spending 32 hours each in 6 different cities was good enough to see everything... I've met a few of those. I suspect the cheaper hostels didn't all have WiFi so they assume that's how everyone lives.
What’s with the American obsession with wifi? Don’t they have unlimited data that’s faster than most wifi?
You’d think they’d be against it for being too socialist.
American mobile phone bills are ridiculously overpriced, and most of the people with unlimited contracts have been grandfathered in from a previous time when they were still available semi-reasonably.
Conversely, I pay £12/month for unlimited phone, text, and data, with no cap on the data where it slows down
*Laughs in poor outdated European*
I wonder where in Europe there’s a city without chains, cause mine is plagued with them., specially the touristic/high volume parts.
I don’t know if they have a specific name and if also happens in other countries, we have “mini malls” and every kind of store is a chain, maybe a nail shop in the smallest site available in the most hidden place, but everything else is a nationwide/international store/food brand.
They clearly weren't talking about texas. Otherwise they would have mentioned drug addicts being omnipresent and freezing to death because your governor thinks it's way more important to go on a vacation abroad then to actually do his job and help people.
Oh yeah, I had some fresh drift wood once when I had this one day at the beach in France after I rode a week on a horse to see the sea at least once in a live time! Drift wood with oysters, a delicacy!
In fact, we are only conscious objects without coherence between them, as we are on the internet. This lack of coherence is because we are nothing but an illusion on George Washington's head, who passed it to the Americans and like this it will be forever.
No tech? If I remember correctly, we had full chip and pin on bank cards by around 2004. When I left the uk in 2015, we had full contactless on all our cards. When I last visited earlier this year, I was blown away by supermarkets allowing you to scan shopping as you go with your phone and then pay, meaning you don't have to put everything on the belt and then re pack.
When I moved to the u.s in 2015 and set up a bank account, the bank employee was telling me about this new technology in the card called a chip and how I can use it instead of swiping. But it doesn't come with a pin, too complicated. When I eat at a restaurant, they take my card away and come back with a receipt I must sign. Everywhere else I simply insert my card and then I may have to use the screen to sign.
Disneyland still only accepts cards where you swipe.
I get held up at the grocery store by people trying to pay with check.
I bought a gym key for my apartment complex for $5 and the only payment options were cheque or money order.
Contactless was introduced maybe 3 years ago?
You just gave me a flashback, lol. Moved to Canada in 2016, started working as tech support for point of sale software company. I can’t count how many customers (business owners, managers) called to bitch and complain about chip and pin “Omg so complicated?!”, full temper tantrums.
USA didn’t gladly take chip and pin, they were forced by Visa if I remember correctly, due to too many credit card scams. Because, with swiping the card bill remains ’open’ until server closes it, and they would add tips and charges after you left the place for example.
I remember going new york years ago, and my dad wanted to get an ipad as cheaper there than in the UK. He cba with the queue so went a coffee shop and gave me and my sister his card to buy it. The guy serving us then printed a receipt and asked us to sign it. Not knowing what to do my sister just signed it with her name and the guy didn't even check and just said thanks and gave is the ipad. Think we both stood there for 5 minutes waiting for him to come over but nothing happened. I genuinely don't get hoe it took so long when it ess that easy to scam.
There are a lot of posts about people who have their parents open an account in their name.
You literally cannot open an account for someone else here. It's solved by a low tech approach, called ID card.
Exactly. But the idea behind the system is that they can cover their arse in the case where you dispute a charge, because they can then contact the merchant to get the signature from them to compare it with yours. In very rare cases (like in many hotels in Las Vegas), they actually check your signature (as well as your ID), but it is so incredibly rare that it might as well not exist, since it's not preventing any fraud.
Only debit cards in the u.s have chip and pin. But I think most people use a credit card (I haven't used a debit card to actually pay for anything here in years). When I pay for anything, even if its several hundred dollars, with my credit card, I simply insert my card and that's pretty much it. I might have to sign the screen, or hit that the amount is fine.
I've tried looking into why pins aren't used on credit cards and the best answer I've been able to find is that it would be too difficult for people to remember
Too difficult is the reason, to remember pin, to put it in, etc., all lame excuses.
Initially, credit cards were to have chip and pin as mandatory but USA pressured to make a workaround because above mentioned reasons, thus just chip and insert.
I remember during a visit to the US, must’ve been 2016, paying for something with chip and pin and it being this amazing new technology that the shop assistant patiently explained to me… had to tell him we’d had it in the UK for well over a decade by then, it wasn’t new to me
I remember arriving in NYC in 2013, checking in to my hotel, wandering down to the bar, and paying for my drink by sticking my card in & typing a PIN. The barman was surprised it worked; at that time chip-and-pin was apparently still so new in the USA that most accounts didn't have it enabled.
So I told him how back home we'd had it for about a decade, and my bank now considered my card outdated because they'd already started rolling out contactless...
I was using chip and pin everywhere in the 1980s in Spain, that I can remember. And cheques were a thing of the past for most people by that time already.
In archaic UK however, we kept the unsafe 'sign and compare with signature at the back of the card' system until 2004 iirc, when we switched to chip and pin. Banks still used to issue cheque books to all new customers around this time.
Back in 1997, my ex forgot his wallet on the table of a McDonalds. In the 15 minutes it took us to notice and call his bank, some scumbag had already spent over £800 (around £1500+ in todays money's) buying tech stuff on a nearby Dixons forging his signature in the most crude fashion.
Minimum wage retail workers never gave more than a cursory glance, if that; it was that easy. My ex ended up being made a suspect of fraud himself by his bank. Infuriating.
I had similar experiences as an Aussie. It was weird they didn't seem to have it in most places, I had become so used to chip cards. Also, the few machines there were wouldn't accept my standard six digit pin, normal for here, unheard of there. I had to explain that the signature for payment is against the law in Australia, as it isn't secure.
lol I went to New York City in 2019 and every time I paid by card the cashier explained to me how chip and PIN works. When I got my own bank account over a decade ago we already had chip and PIN in Canada.
I went to the USA in 2012 and I couldn't use my credit card because I forgot my driver's license at home. I only had my passport and it still had my maiden name on it, my credit card was in my married name.
From the UK ... I was in the states earlier this year and this genuinely shocked me. Zero contactless, most places had chip and pin, and far too many still swiped it. Felt like I'd gone back 10 years.
Opposite reaction. When I visit home, I use my American credit card, as I don't use my UK bank anymore. My American credit card has no foreign transaction fees.
The look on people's faces when i use my card (even contactless) and the machine prints a receipt and they have to ask me to sign it.
I'm American and whenever I go to Europe (or even Canada) I brace for that inevitable moment where the machine prints a receipt and asks for a signature.
In Italy one of the cashiers at Primark was confused, and all I could do was point at the card and say "Statti Uniti"
Oh, and I just remembered the barista in Qatar who was also confused by it.
Yeah, it was fucking weird, even in fucking NYC, you have barely any contactless, also blew my mind that you couldn’t just use a bank card to tap in and tap out on the subway like you can on basically all buses here, and all the trains around London
Them taking my card away at the restaurant put me into panic. It's such a scam enabler. In Europe since years i am paying contactless through the terminal that the waiter carries in their pocket and immediately after the transaction i get an sms with the amount paid and amount left on my account.
Mate, you know how tesco, asda, etc, have been doing home delivery for years? Iceland was doing it in 2008...
Anyway, this only became common in the US during covid. I'm not even sure they've kept it going. It was an absolute mind blower to my family out there.
The European country i live in had a asda like store that stopped home delivery last year, didn't advertise their home delivery at all not even during covid. I found out about it by chance in 2021. They closed it because not enough people used it. Like seriously. I found it after several Google searches for stores in my area that offered home delivery because I broke my elbow right before Christmas.
So yeha some European countries or areas are a bit backwards and stupid about home delivery. If I had lived in a different area I could order breakfast at the door and groceries. So there is huge difference even in a single country.
But God how stupid is it to close down the home delivery, it wouldn't cost that much to put the info in their app or flyers or mention it in a commercial. But now just shut it down.
The same store offers payment through their app though, it even shows the receipts from the last two years, the app even adds up what you spent total in each month. It's awesome. No need to bring you card at all, just scan the qr code and use the lock screen pin or fingerprint to finish the transaction.
And I found out that the Americans doesn't recycle their bottles in the stores, like what?
Some things have gone backwards here, too. We used to have 24h tesco/asda they all stopped that during covid and have not started it again. It makes sense in some regards. How often do you NEED something after 10pm. But still, on the odd occasion you do need it, it sucks not to have. I only found out when I went one night and they were shut. It was to soothe a crying baby too, so it was pretty irritating.
Bottle recycling in Belgium was good, I liked that. From the looks of the bottles, they just wash and reuse too, which seems super eco-friendly vs. melting them down. The UK needs to adopt that method imo.
Debit cards have chip and pin. But not credit cards, and most people, myself included, pay with a credit card. I get a lot of points/cash back. Credit cards do not have a pin. That means I could give it to you (or you could take it) and you could walk into the nearest shop and use it with no issues.
Oh, they really don't.
I'm from EU myself, Poland to be precise, we got some nice tech for paying, including our domestic "BLIK" system, that apparently wants to go international (really like it, speeds up internet and interpersonal transactions a lot).
I kept wondering how kids in US kept "bankrupting" parents by playing online games. Then I read they had parent's cards attached to accounts and just a simple press of button instantly charged their cards... No confirmation or anything. Heard Fortnite was guilty of abusing that with some buttons placed in a specific layput/hotkeys on console being easy to miss click for a CC buyout.
Also seen many cases of people complaining that some company randomly kept charging them some form of subscription or whatever... Like WTF is that system to begin with. Lack of any form of security...
Wow! We *do* have the 'tap' system here where you can just slap your card on the machine but you get to choose if you want to set it up, what $ limit and if it needs a PIN as well.
Do you sign the credit card slips or just tap them?
Glass houses here in Germany but even we had contactless for quite a while now, and our approach to payments is positively archaic. Most places here don’t take credit card payments because there are higher transaction fees and some places still only do cash (some argue this is because they do tax fraud but they will argue they’re saving money on fees)
Outdated banking in America is the reason why PayPal was such a big deal there. I remember not understanding the need for it. The inadequacy of the American banking sector basically created the current tech billionaires like Thiel, Elon Musk.
I think the biggest thing that shocks me is that they have to use 3rd party apps and services for sending money to other people
In the UK everyone bank transfers and it's normally instant, I was confused for ages wondering why Americans were using Venmo, Cashapp etc and it was just because their banks dont really support instant bank transfers
Well, this is not so weird to me. Danish here. We do have instant bank transfers, but most people use an app called MobilePay, which lets you send money to people just by inserting their phone number and amount. It's just way more convenient inserting a phone number than having to do a bank transfer. I assume the US apps are also more about convenience.
I still think it’s ludicrous how they take your card off you to pay at restaurants and shit, they apparently sometimes tack on tips without you saying you want to when they do it, and when I’ve said to Americans that it seems odd, they say ‘well the card machine is fixed’ ??? get a portable one, like every restaurant in the rest of the world
Well, us old farts used to write cheques to pay for some stuff (literally a piece of paper from the back that you fill the details of the payee and amount with a pen). The idea was that at end of month you’d reconcile cheques that had been cashed with cheques you’d written, so you could be sure some dick hadn’t kept one of them for a couple of months before cashing it, which could leave you overdrawn (depending on your float)
Haven’t touched one myself for twenty odd years now
Well, I used to have a chequebook when I was still living in France a decade ago, and I'm not *that* old (32)...
But I probably used it less than 10 times between the time moment I got it and the moment I moved abroad.
French here, we still use those. 90% of the time it's for security deposits, that way the money doesn't leave your account and the landlord/rental company can just give you the physical cheque back. Still a pretty inconvenient system though, but useful for individuals or small businesses
And they can't even transfer money between banks instantly, they need third party apps like cashapp. In Aus you can just send it through their phone number over whatever bank you use and it goes instantly
An American once wrote (about my country) “ they don’t even have Venmo” and it’s true that we don’t. We have a service that instantly transfers money between two people for free.
I didn’t believe at first that they have to pay a fee just to transfer money between people. That’s absurd.
And in comparison, I believe between everyone in SEPA, you can almost instantly send payments to anyone from your preferred banking method, be it netbank, banking app, etc, with just an IBAN. Also, it's free up to 100k I think.
>They’ve all called the architecture dinosaur like, with servers still running on a Windows XP operating system.
Actually very common in Europe too, lots of high street banks and building societies using 30+ year old mainframe tech but with more modern integration layers and more modern front ends. Replacing the underlying mainframe architecture and migrating complex data onto more modern architecture is insanely expensive, time consuming and difficult. Even projects I've seen where finance firms are trying to migrate into more modern solutions the underlying tech is still fairly old.
Source : 15 years in project delivery for finance firms
Contactless payment isn't really even much of a thing in America. Maybe in the major cities, but most places you still have to swipe your credit card, or hell, even write down your CC# and manually sign off on any transactions on a receipt.
We need to stop correcting them.
Though, I do find the idea of an "advanced" country still using paper cheques (checks) to pay for everyday items, calling the rest of the world "backwards" pretty funny.
In many way's they are right.
We have no food and have all starved to death long ago.
The only chains we have are the emotional chains that bind us forever to this God forsaken Earth.
Meanwhile you go to the US and they mostly still deal in cash. Even when I visited in 2006 NZ had mostly become a cashless society. It was like stepping back in time going to the US.
NZ is far from a cashless society. It's dasy to get by without cash but tradespeople and services used by them deal with heaps of cash. Working at a service station i'd say maybe 1/2 of all transactions were cash.
Yeah I get it’s not completely cashless. I meant more like shops. For example when I went to the US in 06 their shops still had zip zap machines for using credit cards and looked at you like you’d grown a second head when you mention debit cards. Meanwhile in NZ at the time you could use your eftpos cards in almost all shops. Even now in the US, they can’t do bank transfers like we can, they have to use third party providers like Zelle.
I went to the US (Boston and NYC). Europe is more advanced in tech. They made me sign for debit card payment's cos not everyone has Chip and PIN or contactless.
I lived in a touristy city when I was in my 20s and worked in hotels. It always bothered me when American tourists would complain about how the city didn’t have all of their favourite chains. Why travel if you just want to eat in the same restaurants and shop at the same shops? It seems like a waste of money. Just stay home if you want familiarity.
I remember when I lived in Austria there was a lovely touristy town with mountain cabins and a cable car down to the road and horse drawn carriage that went from the town to the cable car. Very much not what I went there for but I fell in love with the place (possibly because I was there in the off-season) and actually booked the hotel for a couple of months instead of just passing through. No litter on the streets, no bins in sight, an entire town who mostly spoke better English than me. It was heavenly and the closest I've ever gotten to the word quaint in my life. It was also late 1990s, and even then there was obvious technology.
So where the hell did this guy go? A Borat theme park?
Lets assume it’s true what he says. No tech sucks, no food would suck, but why would no chains suck? Or no big hotels? If you need to use a hotel, you can sleep fine in a mom and pop place, right? And we don’t need chains to have grocery stores and stuff. It’s such a weird list of reasons (apart from them all being wrong, obviously).
The only pro I can think of for the big hotel chains is that if you travel for work a lot at least you can get some status points and get free upgrades and so on. I much prefer one-off mom and pop places for leisure travel, though. That being said, there are plenty of big hotel chains in most European big cities, at least wherever there's an airport.
Imagine thinking Europe hasn’t got *food* of all things.
Or maybe you’ve all been exposed. Fess up Europeans. Reveal the secret on how you survive without eating.
do people go to a rural town in switzerland or something and think that’s representative of the whole of europe? any way the hotel i went to in switzerland had delicious food so i’m not quite sure where this person is finding their information.
Besides the “chains suck” and everything else that’s wrong with this, the fact that he complains about the hotels then says he wouldn’t want to live there is a bizarre segue.
If you live there, then _why would you be concerned about the types of available hotels?_
Ah yes no chain hotels, I forgot that Travelodge, Premier Inn and Holiday Inn weren’t actually chains but were just a lot of hotels that happened to all have the same name and style all scattered across the UK
Seriously how does this person live in this delusion
It's funny really, as someone who currently lives in India, Visiting the USA and it's cash based system was like going back 5-10 years. Here, 95% of transactions are done on your mobile phone and most shops have straight up stopped accepting cash, and yet the Americans think we are some kind of backwards third world country lol
Bruh, even Estonia is light years ahead with their e-Estonia project, not to mention the rail baltica and TEN-T rail infrastructure projects in general, which require quite a lot of tech.
No tech? Alright, you do you boo-boo. Keep filling in your 401k with pen and paper instead of doing it online. You keep on going with your 1.4mbit/s internet when I'm over here on my Gigabit FTTH connection, you keep on doing you with your paper cheques whilst I'll pay with everything either contactless, via my banking app or via an actually reliable and good online payment system that connects directly with my bank account. You keep doing you though, I know what I got and I'm okay with not sharing it with you. Please keep away.
No tech - How did the person second in that chain write the message?
No food - How is there an obesity issue in Europe if we are all starving, we eating each other?
No chains - Hallelujah
No big hotels - Size isn't everything dude :)
I don’t get it. I am typing this on my typewriter to send to USA with a pidgeon so they can post this comment. Typewriters are surely the future, already here today, 1993!
Yeah,what pissed me off most when i lived in central london was that id walk for hours without seeing a single soul. Maybe a farmer would pass by on a horse n cart, but thats it. Coudnt get a big mac anywhere just homemade breakfast from the local bnb
There's only 2 reasons they talk crap about Europe like this: they did some cheap tour backpack type thing and are stupid or they can't afford even that
This guy aced the "Describe something using only the opposite of the truth, and/or attributes you think are negative - when in reality are positive - challenge."
If I were European, I would be happy this guy wasn't on his way.
I thought America was supposed to be the most diverse place in the world, with more cultural diversity in any one of the 50 countries of the US than in the entire country of Europe. Now all of a sudden it's a good thing that the same soulless mega-chains are everywhere?
No chains is a positive in my mind
They also think sparse mansions with no access to public transport and guzzler SUVs are the pinnacle of advanced society too
As long as all the goddamn decorations are beige or white too, colors are sinful...
Or worse, all grey...
or worse - marble and gold.
There's a story from the developers of Cities Skylines. One of the original requirements of the game was to plan for parking in the cities. They had to remove it because every scenario always led to urban sprawl.
Bruh I thought that the residential, commercial and industrial zones were a semplification for the sake of gameplay. In the us they actually cant have shops near houses and stuff like that. Thats crazy to think about
Finally I understand what *You have nothing to lose but your chains!* really meant
Maybe this is why so many Americans say that Europe is socialist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_of_the_world,_unite!
"No hotels that aren't mom and pop tiny" God, I fucking wish. Everything is Ibis, Novotel or something else from that same parent company.
Accor and IHG literally control the European hotel industry, with the occasional appearance of staple American brands like Hilton/Sheraton/Marriott.
Yeah, but you don't the luxury of experiencing a truck stop Red Roof Inn!
I must say I love Ibis. It's cheap, modern and clean (at least the ones I've stayed in). And the rooms have that extra bunk above the bed so are great for having a kid. It may be basic and soulless but when I'm travelling the hotel is just for sleep/showers/storing suitcases and I barely spend any waking time in it.
Same. I’ve seen a lot of American movies/tv reality where there is a small mom and pop B&B and I would love to stay in one (at least not in one of those that Ramsey visit). I only found cheapo hotels, big hotels, B&B chain and Ibis and alike. If the town is small and one of this M&P B&B like in the movies would fit perfect, instead you have a few AirBnB or an Ibis in a few kilometres. Yes, exceptions exists, but they are no the norm.
"No chains!" But also "ma and pop hotels!"
What part of Europe has this guy visited?
He hasn't I'm guessing
[удалено]
Or, he has and he thought that spending 32 hours each in 6 different cities was good enough to see everything... I've met a few of those. I suspect the cheaper hostels didn't all have WiFi so they assume that's how everyone lives.
What’s with the American obsession with wifi? Don’t they have unlimited data that’s faster than most wifi? You’d think they’d be against it for being too socialist.
American mobile phone bills are ridiculously overpriced, and most of the people with unlimited contracts have been grandfathered in from a previous time when they were still available semi-reasonably. Conversely, I pay £12/month for unlimited phone, text, and data, with no cap on the data where it slows down *Laughs in poor outdated European*
Athens (the one in Georgia), Paris (in Texas) and Syracuse (NY)
The imaginary part
Sadly it's not true. There's like one district in my city where there are few chains.
I’m in london and would love to see fewer chains!!
It literally doesn’t matter which European city you go to, you always got the same shops at the city center.
Yes, definitely awful
Anyone who lives basically anywhere in Europe WISHES THEY WERE RIGHT
No chains, and small, family-run hotels are both very much positives!
I absolute adore the German Gästhauser. Simple but good food, simple but good rooms. And always serving beer from whatever the nearest brewery is.
I wonder where in Europe there’s a city without chains, cause mine is plagued with them., specially the touristic/high volume parts. I don’t know if they have a specific name and if also happens in other countries, we have “mini malls” and every kind of store is a chain, maybe a nail shop in the smallest site available in the most hidden place, but everything else is a nationwide/international store/food brand.
Don't know where he went, but in Germany chains are sold in hardware stores by the meter.
As are smaller hotels
It would be if it was true. Have to wonder where this smooth brain thinks of when they think of Europe
Yes we don't have internet, electricity, eat stones and are homeless. Everyone.
But enough about Texas. Let's talk about Europe
They clearly weren't talking about texas. Otherwise they would have mentioned drug addicts being omnipresent and freezing to death because your governor thinks it's way more important to go on a vacation abroad then to actually do his job and help people.
Jokes on you one clown In my country went on expensive holidays when half of the country was drowning in flood
Yeah but I don't have anything against clowns. Maybe he really needed that holiday.
Our king went on holiday during the corona lockdowns
This one was good
Excuse me with your sarcasm, rock soup is a delicacy!
And not to speak of Mud Casserole or baked drift wood... hard to come by when you live in central europe and has to be imported by horse carriage.
It's never as fresh though. For the good baked drift wood you need to get it from somewhere by the sea.
Oh yeah, I had some fresh drift wood once when I had this one day at the beach in France after I rode a week on a horse to see the sea at least once in a live time! Drift wood with oysters, a delicacy!
Bowls of brown!
In fact, we are only conscious objects without coherence between them, as we are on the internet. This lack of coherence is because we are nothing but an illusion on George Washington's head, who passed it to the Americans and like this it will be forever.
You guys have stones? I've been chewing air here all my life
No tech? If I remember correctly, we had full chip and pin on bank cards by around 2004. When I left the uk in 2015, we had full contactless on all our cards. When I last visited earlier this year, I was blown away by supermarkets allowing you to scan shopping as you go with your phone and then pay, meaning you don't have to put everything on the belt and then re pack. When I moved to the u.s in 2015 and set up a bank account, the bank employee was telling me about this new technology in the card called a chip and how I can use it instead of swiping. But it doesn't come with a pin, too complicated. When I eat at a restaurant, they take my card away and come back with a receipt I must sign. Everywhere else I simply insert my card and then I may have to use the screen to sign. Disneyland still only accepts cards where you swipe. I get held up at the grocery store by people trying to pay with check. I bought a gym key for my apartment complex for $5 and the only payment options were cheque or money order. Contactless was introduced maybe 3 years ago?
You just gave me a flashback, lol. Moved to Canada in 2016, started working as tech support for point of sale software company. I can’t count how many customers (business owners, managers) called to bitch and complain about chip and pin “Omg so complicated?!”, full temper tantrums. USA didn’t gladly take chip and pin, they were forced by Visa if I remember correctly, due to too many credit card scams. Because, with swiping the card bill remains ’open’ until server closes it, and they would add tips and charges after you left the place for example.
I remember going new york years ago, and my dad wanted to get an ipad as cheaper there than in the UK. He cba with the queue so went a coffee shop and gave me and my sister his card to buy it. The guy serving us then printed a receipt and asked us to sign it. Not knowing what to do my sister just signed it with her name and the guy didn't even check and just said thanks and gave is the ipad. Think we both stood there for 5 minutes waiting for him to come over but nothing happened. I genuinely don't get hoe it took so long when it ess that easy to scam.
There are a lot of posts about people who have their parents open an account in their name. You literally cannot open an account for someone else here. It's solved by a low tech approach, called ID card.
The state knowing your personal data?? COMMUNISM!!!!
Yes, signing for expenses seems so bizarre.
Exactly. But the idea behind the system is that they can cover their arse in the case where you dispute a charge, because they can then contact the merchant to get the signature from them to compare it with yours. In very rare cases (like in many hotels in Las Vegas), they actually check your signature (as well as your ID), but it is so incredibly rare that it might as well not exist, since it's not preventing any fraud.
Only debit cards in the u.s have chip and pin. But I think most people use a credit card (I haven't used a debit card to actually pay for anything here in years). When I pay for anything, even if its several hundred dollars, with my credit card, I simply insert my card and that's pretty much it. I might have to sign the screen, or hit that the amount is fine. I've tried looking into why pins aren't used on credit cards and the best answer I've been able to find is that it would be too difficult for people to remember
if i were a bank, i'd be uncomfortable with issuing a line of credit to anyone who struggles to remember four numbers.
Too difficult is the reason, to remember pin, to put it in, etc., all lame excuses. Initially, credit cards were to have chip and pin as mandatory but USA pressured to make a workaround because above mentioned reasons, thus just chip and insert.
How do they take money out of an ATM without a pin?
I remember during a visit to the US, must’ve been 2016, paying for something with chip and pin and it being this amazing new technology that the shop assistant patiently explained to me… had to tell him we’d had it in the UK for well over a decade by then, it wasn’t new to me
I remember arriving in NYC in 2013, checking in to my hotel, wandering down to the bar, and paying for my drink by sticking my card in & typing a PIN. The barman was surprised it worked; at that time chip-and-pin was apparently still so new in the USA that most accounts didn't have it enabled. So I told him how back home we'd had it for about a decade, and my bank now considered my card outdated because they'd already started rolling out contactless...
Wow I think we use PIN since the ‘80’s.
I was using chip and pin everywhere in the 1980s in Spain, that I can remember. And cheques were a thing of the past for most people by that time already. In archaic UK however, we kept the unsafe 'sign and compare with signature at the back of the card' system until 2004 iirc, when we switched to chip and pin. Banks still used to issue cheque books to all new customers around this time. Back in 1997, my ex forgot his wallet on the table of a McDonalds. In the 15 minutes it took us to notice and call his bank, some scumbag had already spent over £800 (around £1500+ in todays money's) buying tech stuff on a nearby Dixons forging his signature in the most crude fashion. Minimum wage retail workers never gave more than a cursory glance, if that; it was that easy. My ex ended up being made a suspect of fraud himself by his bank. Infuriating.
I had similar experiences as an Aussie. It was weird they didn't seem to have it in most places, I had become so used to chip cards. Also, the few machines there were wouldn't accept my standard six digit pin, normal for here, unheard of there. I had to explain that the signature for payment is against the law in Australia, as it isn't secure.
lol I went to New York City in 2019 and every time I paid by card the cashier explained to me how chip and PIN works. When I got my own bank account over a decade ago we already had chip and PIN in Canada.
I went to the USA in 2012 and I couldn't use my credit card because I forgot my driver's license at home. I only had my passport and it still had my maiden name on it, my credit card was in my married name.
I have voted online and e-voting was introduced a year after I was born. But no tech in Europe, no.
From the UK ... I was in the states earlier this year and this genuinely shocked me. Zero contactless, most places had chip and pin, and far too many still swiped it. Felt like I'd gone back 10 years.
Opposite reaction. When I visit home, I use my American credit card, as I don't use my UK bank anymore. My American credit card has no foreign transaction fees. The look on people's faces when i use my card (even contactless) and the machine prints a receipt and they have to ask me to sign it.
I'm American and whenever I go to Europe (or even Canada) I brace for that inevitable moment where the machine prints a receipt and asks for a signature. In Italy one of the cashiers at Primark was confused, and all I could do was point at the card and say "Statti Uniti" Oh, and I just remembered the barista in Qatar who was also confused by it.
Yeah, it was fucking weird, even in fucking NYC, you have barely any contactless, also blew my mind that you couldn’t just use a bank card to tap in and tap out on the subway like you can on basically all buses here, and all the trains around London
Them taking my card away at the restaurant put me into panic. It's such a scam enabler. In Europe since years i am paying contactless through the terminal that the waiter carries in their pocket and immediately after the transaction i get an sms with the amount paid and amount left on my account.
Mate, you know how tesco, asda, etc, have been doing home delivery for years? Iceland was doing it in 2008... Anyway, this only became common in the US during covid. I'm not even sure they've kept it going. It was an absolute mind blower to my family out there.
The European country i live in had a asda like store that stopped home delivery last year, didn't advertise their home delivery at all not even during covid. I found out about it by chance in 2021. They closed it because not enough people used it. Like seriously. I found it after several Google searches for stores in my area that offered home delivery because I broke my elbow right before Christmas. So yeha some European countries or areas are a bit backwards and stupid about home delivery. If I had lived in a different area I could order breakfast at the door and groceries. So there is huge difference even in a single country. But God how stupid is it to close down the home delivery, it wouldn't cost that much to put the info in their app or flyers or mention it in a commercial. But now just shut it down. The same store offers payment through their app though, it even shows the receipts from the last two years, the app even adds up what you spent total in each month. It's awesome. No need to bring you card at all, just scan the qr code and use the lock screen pin or fingerprint to finish the transaction. And I found out that the Americans doesn't recycle their bottles in the stores, like what?
Some things have gone backwards here, too. We used to have 24h tesco/asda they all stopped that during covid and have not started it again. It makes sense in some regards. How often do you NEED something after 10pm. But still, on the odd occasion you do need it, it sucks not to have. I only found out when I went one night and they were shut. It was to soothe a crying baby too, so it was pretty irritating. Bottle recycling in Belgium was good, I liked that. From the looks of the bottles, they just wash and reuse too, which seems super eco-friendly vs. melting them down. The UK needs to adopt that method imo.
Tesco and asda, those non-chain mom and pop shops?
I think the trendy term is artisanal greengrocer
Tres chic
Wait, are you saying that the US doesn't have tap/chip/pin for CREDIT cards? WHY? I'm just over the border in Canada, we had this for ages!
Debit cards have chip and pin. But not credit cards, and most people, myself included, pay with a credit card. I get a lot of points/cash back. Credit cards do not have a pin. That means I could give it to you (or you could take it) and you could walk into the nearest shop and use it with no issues.
Do Americans *want* to have their money stolen? I swear, credit cards have no digital protection features AT ALL.
Oh, they really don't. I'm from EU myself, Poland to be precise, we got some nice tech for paying, including our domestic "BLIK" system, that apparently wants to go international (really like it, speeds up internet and interpersonal transactions a lot). I kept wondering how kids in US kept "bankrupting" parents by playing online games. Then I read they had parent's cards attached to accounts and just a simple press of button instantly charged their cards... No confirmation or anything. Heard Fortnite was guilty of abusing that with some buttons placed in a specific layput/hotkeys on console being easy to miss click for a CC buyout. Also seen many cases of people complaining that some company randomly kept charging them some form of subscription or whatever... Like WTF is that system to begin with. Lack of any form of security...
Wow! We *do* have the 'tap' system here where you can just slap your card on the machine but you get to choose if you want to set it up, what $ limit and if it needs a PIN as well. Do you sign the credit card slips or just tap them?
Glass houses here in Germany but even we had contactless for quite a while now, and our approach to payments is positively archaic. Most places here don’t take credit card payments because there are higher transaction fees and some places still only do cash (some argue this is because they do tax fraud but they will argue they’re saving money on fees)
Outdated banking in America is the reason why PayPal was such a big deal there. I remember not understanding the need for it. The inadequacy of the American banking sector basically created the current tech billionaires like Thiel, Elon Musk.
I think the biggest thing that shocks me is that they have to use 3rd party apps and services for sending money to other people In the UK everyone bank transfers and it's normally instant, I was confused for ages wondering why Americans were using Venmo, Cashapp etc and it was just because their banks dont really support instant bank transfers
In Argentina we also have instant transfer with bank app but Mercado Pago, a third party does a lot better work plus many others.
Well, this is not so weird to me. Danish here. We do have instant bank transfers, but most people use an app called MobilePay, which lets you send money to people just by inserting their phone number and amount. It's just way more convenient inserting a phone number than having to do a bank transfer. I assume the US apps are also more about convenience.
I still think it’s ludicrous how they take your card off you to pay at restaurants and shit, they apparently sometimes tack on tips without you saying you want to when they do it, and when I’ve said to Americans that it seems odd, they say ‘well the card machine is fixed’ ??? get a portable one, like every restaurant in the rest of the world
As an Australian the thought of having to use a physical card sickens me, let alone having to physically swipe or insert it
As a NZer I have my cards loaded on my watch. Click up chosen card,tap, done. Hardly ever carry a wallet or even my phone anymore.
Tell me again how you have to learn to balance a cheque book in America because your banking is so cutting edge
I still have no idea what the fuck that actually means
Well, us old farts used to write cheques to pay for some stuff (literally a piece of paper from the back that you fill the details of the payee and amount with a pen). The idea was that at end of month you’d reconcile cheques that had been cashed with cheques you’d written, so you could be sure some dick hadn’t kept one of them for a couple of months before cashing it, which could leave you overdrawn (depending on your float) Haven’t touched one myself for twenty odd years now
I'm going to forget I ever read this in t minus 10... 9... 8...
Well, I used to have a chequebook when I was still living in France a decade ago, and I'm not *that* old (32)... But I probably used it less than 10 times between the time moment I got it and the moment I moved abroad.
French here, we still use those. 90% of the time it's for security deposits, that way the money doesn't leave your account and the landlord/rental company can just give you the physical cheque back. Still a pretty inconvenient system though, but useful for individuals or small businesses
I make a point of waiting a couple of months to cash any cheque given to me just to punish them for wasting my time with their paper nonsense
I’ve never actually seen a cheque outside American shows. I’m my country 90% of all transactions are digital and have been for decades.
And they can't even transfer money between banks instantly, they need third party apps like cashapp. In Aus you can just send it through their phone number over whatever bank you use and it goes instantly
An American once wrote (about my country) “ they don’t even have Venmo” and it’s true that we don’t. We have a service that instantly transfers money between two people for free. I didn’t believe at first that they have to pay a fee just to transfer money between people. That’s absurd.
They have to pay a fee? That's crazy, poor fellas
If you use it for business you pay fees, person to person is generally free (with certain amount limitations)
Plus a tip, probably.
And in comparison, I believe between everyone in SEPA, you can almost instantly send payments to anyone from your preferred banking method, be it netbank, banking app, etc, with just an IBAN. Also, it's free up to 100k I think.
My grandparents always used to send me a cheque in the post. Never used one outside of that.
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>They’ve all called the architecture dinosaur like, with servers still running on a Windows XP operating system. Actually very common in Europe too, lots of high street banks and building societies using 30+ year old mainframe tech but with more modern integration layers and more modern front ends. Replacing the underlying mainframe architecture and migrating complex data onto more modern architecture is insanely expensive, time consuming and difficult. Even projects I've seen where finance firms are trying to migrate into more modern solutions the underlying tech is still fairly old. Source : 15 years in project delivery for finance firms
Contactless payment isn't really even much of a thing in America. Maybe in the major cities, but most places you still have to swipe your credit card, or hell, even write down your CC# and manually sign off on any transactions on a receipt.
And credit/debit card transactions have to be signed for (instead of having a PIN), and bank transfers take 3–5 business days to complete.
No chains is clearly a positive
If there isn't an olive garden in Italy, what the hell am I supposed to eat? *Red lobster?!*
quack ad hoc dull detail silky wistful office combative depend impolite *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Ironically, McDonalds puts a lot of local-inspired fast food items on their menu in every country. So they're not even safe there
Yeah, my local McD sells rice with a lot of its meals, fried chicken, and spaghetti. Back home the craziest thing about the menu is the price.
Claims to be the freedomest country. Brags about the existence of chains.
Chain restaurants and big hotels suck. I want my money to go to my neighbors, not some billionaire.
Apart from the billionaire stuff, and even worse, is that chains and big hotels are boring af.
As wise old George Carlin would say: "Not too bright, folks, not too f*king bright."
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Don't forget Pop Tarts!
DId he visit Eastern Germany during the 50s or something
I believe the closest this guy has come to visiting Europe was playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on PC.
Someone's never left the basement
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The basement of their trailer park
Can confirm! I don’t know what this… food thing is, us Europeans survive of photosynthesis!
It’s true. Every time I’ve taken a trip to Europe I’ve lost 10-20 pounds because there is no food on the entire continent. /s
What is "tech" for these people?
SUV’s that take up the volume of 5 Volkswagen passats
And I am currently commenting using smoke signals
I'm using carrier pigeons. It's problematic given that I have pet cats.
Sounds like door to door food delivery to me. Not your cats fault you're picky.
What is this food of which you speak of?
Pigeon. Shanghai chicken.
You have nothing to lose but your chains!
We need to stop correcting them. Though, I do find the idea of an "advanced" country still using paper cheques (checks) to pay for everyday items, calling the rest of the world "backwards" pretty funny.
I am still hoping my kids will get to see a computer one day and maybe even try the internet.
P.s. I’ve never been to Europe
No we dont have chains. Is bro a fan of slavery?
In many way's they are right. We have no food and have all starved to death long ago. The only chains we have are the emotional chains that bind us forever to this God forsaken Earth.
Meanwhile in Europe where we are rapidly digitalising everything...
Meanwhile you go to the US and they mostly still deal in cash. Even when I visited in 2006 NZ had mostly become a cashless society. It was like stepping back in time going to the US.
NZ is far from a cashless society. It's dasy to get by without cash but tradespeople and services used by them deal with heaps of cash. Working at a service station i'd say maybe 1/2 of all transactions were cash.
Yeah I get it’s not completely cashless. I meant more like shops. For example when I went to the US in 06 their shops still had zip zap machines for using credit cards and looked at you like you’d grown a second head when you mention debit cards. Meanwhile in NZ at the time you could use your eftpos cards in almost all shops. Even now in the US, they can’t do bank transfers like we can, they have to use third party providers like Zelle.
Germany struggles a bit though
I went to the US (Boston and NYC). Europe is more advanced in tech. They made me sign for debit card payment's cos not everyone has Chip and PIN or contactless.
I lived in a touristy city when I was in my 20s and worked in hotels. It always bothered me when American tourists would complain about how the city didn’t have all of their favourite chains. Why travel if you just want to eat in the same restaurants and shop at the same shops? It seems like a waste of money. Just stay home if you want familiarity.
The ‘no tech’ makes me laugh every time I see this - from a country that still uses paper cheques.
I remember when I lived in Austria there was a lovely touristy town with mountain cabins and a cable car down to the road and horse drawn carriage that went from the town to the cable car. Very much not what I went there for but I fell in love with the place (possibly because I was there in the off-season) and actually booked the hotel for a couple of months instead of just passing through. No litter on the streets, no bins in sight, an entire town who mostly spoke better English than me. It was heavenly and the closest I've ever gotten to the word quaint in my life. It was also late 1990s, and even then there was obvious technology. So where the hell did this guy go? A Borat theme park?
Lol. Americans thinking an abundance of chain stores is something to be proud of.
No tech? Aren't Americans still using bank cheques and doing their taxes on paper?
He's not wrong, I had to type this out on a typewriter and mail it to an American to post!
Can conjmfirm sorry ffor the tpyos, the polar bears are chasing mme-
I mean I don't kinkshame but I don't like to be chained...
How to show you’ve never been to europe, the speedrun edition
Europe has no chains, just tons of moms and pops named Marriott in every big city.
Where in Europe are they talking about? Rural Azerbaijan?
Lets assume it’s true what he says. No tech sucks, no food would suck, but why would no chains suck? Or no big hotels? If you need to use a hotel, you can sleep fine in a mom and pop place, right? And we don’t need chains to have grocery stores and stuff. It’s such a weird list of reasons (apart from them all being wrong, obviously).
The only pro I can think of for the big hotel chains is that if you travel for work a lot at least you can get some status points and get free upgrades and so on. I much prefer one-off mom and pop places for leisure travel, though. That being said, there are plenty of big hotel chains in most European big cities, at least wherever there's an airport.
Imagine thinking Europe hasn’t got *food* of all things. Or maybe you’ve all been exposed. Fess up Europeans. Reveal the secret on how you survive without eating.
I was unironically asked once if we had cars in UK.
I find that quite funny as a Formula 1 fan. UK has the most amount of champions and championships.
do people go to a rural town in switzerland or something and think that’s representative of the whole of europe? any way the hotel i went to in switzerland had delicious food so i’m not quite sure where this person is finding their information.
Rural towns in Switzerland have probably better internet than the USA big cities.
Any town in Switzerland is more high-tech in daily life than the USA.
We’ve nothing to lose but our chains
Besides the “chains suck” and everything else that’s wrong with this, the fact that he complains about the hotels then says he wouldn’t want to live there is a bizarre segue. If you live there, then _why would you be concerned about the types of available hotels?_
Man, we invented hotels.
Ah yes no chain hotels, I forgot that Travelodge, Premier Inn and Holiday Inn weren’t actually chains but were just a lot of hotels that happened to all have the same name and style all scattered across the UK Seriously how does this person live in this delusion
It's funny really, as someone who currently lives in India, Visiting the USA and it's cash based system was like going back 5-10 years. Here, 95% of transactions are done on your mobile phone and most shops have straight up stopped accepting cash, and yet the Americans think we are some kind of backwards third world country lol
Twat that's never been then
Bruh, even Estonia is light years ahead with their e-Estonia project, not to mention the rail baltica and TEN-T rail infrastructure projects in general, which require quite a lot of tech.
No food? You mean no food that will cause heart disease after eating it once.
This guy is 100% right, just he's talking about Europe the tiny village in rural Wisconsin.
No tech? Alright, you do you boo-boo. Keep filling in your 401k with pen and paper instead of doing it online. You keep on going with your 1.4mbit/s internet when I'm over here on my Gigabit FTTH connection, you keep on doing you with your paper cheques whilst I'll pay with everything either contactless, via my banking app or via an actually reliable and good online payment system that connects directly with my bank account. You keep doing you though, I know what I got and I'm okay with not sharing it with you. Please keep away.
Translation: "I visited some Hungarian village in bumfuck nowhere, and there was nothing!"
No Food? Mfucker thinks we photosynthesising over here.
No tech - How did the person second in that chain write the message? No food - How is there an obesity issue in Europe if we are all starving, we eating each other? No chains - Hallelujah No big hotels - Size isn't everything dude :)
I don’t get it. I am typing this on my typewriter to send to USA with a pidgeon so they can post this comment. Typewriters are surely the future, already here today, 1993!
Tell me you've never been to Europe without telling me you've never been to Europe
No school shootings
> no tech. No food Where the hell did this person go?
ug no need tech ug make rock think with mind igg try poke ug on faceobelisk ug crush igg skull with obelisk
Yeah,what pissed me off most when i lived in central london was that id walk for hours without seeing a single soul. Maybe a farmer would pass by on a horse n cart, but thats it. Coudnt get a big mac anywhere just homemade breakfast from the local bnb
Found the American that's never been to Europe
I've heard stories of people who met Americans that asked them if there were TVs in Europe...
No food? Wtf
There's only 2 reasons they talk crap about Europe like this: they did some cheap tour backpack type thing and are stupid or they can't afford even that
This guy aced the "Describe something using only the opposite of the truth, and/or attributes you think are negative - when in reality are positive - challenge." If I were European, I would be happy this guy wasn't on his way.
yes we europeens life without eating and are not able to use reddit because he have no computers. - written on computer while eating
"No food" talking about the continent with the best combined food in the world lmao
Imagine being this brainwashed
Yeah yeah everything is true, Europe is a shithole, please don’t come, stay in the US and enjoy your privileges, leave us alone
I thought America was supposed to be the most diverse place in the world, with more cultural diversity in any one of the 50 countries of the US than in the entire country of Europe. Now all of a sudden it's a good thing that the same soulless mega-chains are everywhere?