True, although in the Netherlands this seems to be changing in the last few years. A lot of restaurants and stores for clothes/shoes etc are now accepting them. Grocery stores over here almost never accept credit cards.
If Apple sings some kind of exclusive deal for iPhone payments with the credit card companies I expect that half of Europe will start accepting credit cards because people willing to pay for a 600 euro phone are an interesting market segment.
I meant American Express. Acceptance of Mastercard and Visa is fine here, but American Express used to be far behind and is now playing catch-up.
And for groceries in Amsterdam for example you're going to be searching for quite some time for a supermarket that accepts credit cards. They only accept debit, which is what 99% of the population has as their primary card. Of course everybody has a credit card as well, but that's mostly used for online shopping and things like restaurants, not supermarkets.
So totally different from the US where any supermarket accepts credit-cards.
Discover is non-existing in at least northern Europe.
American Express is a bad choice for many parts of Europe because companies are use to very low processing fees, and AMEX (and Diners Club) are very expensive credit card to process.
Seems some people beg to differ. However AMEX costs more for the retailer, therefore, with everyone already with Visa/MC, why, as a retailer allow people to pay with AMEX? If you want to double your transaction costs, eat into your profit margin, have more admin for the book-keeper, then why not!!!
Part of the point of AMEX is that everyone is insured against scammers that bit more, hence the higher price/charges, however, in Europe where we have C+P nobody really wants AMEX - their business case just is not heard.
CC fraud in America, contrary to popular European belief, is not a problem for American consumers. American consumers are not liable for fraudulent charges made with their card; resolving them is a simple matter of telling your CC company that the charge was fraudulent (the majority of the time, the CC company has already figured that out themselves).
Chip and Pin buys American consumers fuck-all; it is merchants and CC companies that benefit.
European consumers seem to want American consumers to have chip and pin more than American consumers want it for themselves. It is truly bizarre. Are you guys getting a "refer your friends" commission or something?
There are countless USA tourists who go to Europe with their non-chip-and-pin cards and then wonder why it doesn't work. And that must suck for your holidays. So let's try to reduce that.
Chip and PIN has nothing to do with Amex's consumer-friendly chargeback policies. C+P tries to prevent fraudulent transactions, charebacks give consumers over misbehaving merchants.
