The reason debit cards can take a longer time than they should is older people who don't know how to work them learning how to use them, which they never really do. I drove my mother to the store today and she got confused by the fact that this particular store requires you to type in your pin for debit as opposed to letting you sign your name for credit, so rather than let her stand there for five minutes in a daze I just typed it in for her. Another time I remember prompting her to sign her name, etc.
To be sure, it isn't necessarily helped by those ones that automatically go into debit mode, so you have to hit cancel and then hit credit, then sign your name and hit OK (and they put OK over on the left instead of the right for some idiotic reason so half the time people accidentally cancel out of it instead of hitting OK, can anyone explain why they all do that? Was it to make left-handed people not feel put out or something in our greater right-handed society?), which also confuses old people no matter how many times they do it.
Thus it isn't that debit cards take longer it's just old people again...but seriously they are still a million times faster than an old person signing a check.
And don't any of you go "that's ageist, there are some young people who don't know how to use debit cards", because no, there aren't any, really. The worst thing young people do is overdraw their bank accounts, they are all caught up on how to work the card reader, though.
EDIT: Also that poster is about as Orwellian as you can get and the combination of the ad exhorting you to report your neighbors for suspicious activity is just about as spot-on as you can get.
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