Keep in mind that inertia is a thing. Businesses used to have to make an impression on your card on carbon copy paper and physically send the slips in to be processed. When they started swiping cards, restaurants would only have one terminal and it had to be connected to a phone line to work. Both of these situations made it common for you to hand your card to the waiter (usually in the book they brought the check) because they couldn't do it at the table.

Credit cards caught on later in other parts of the world, and they benefited from having more modern options with regards to the equipment used. Governments and banks also did more to mandate the use of security features (chip & pin) than in the US - American banks like people using credit cards - it makes them a lot of money and they're incentivized to keep the barriers low as long as the amount of fraud is manageable to them.

Contactless is pervasive when there's counter service, but most POS systems in the US are still at a fixed staff station, and not one of the portable readers that the waiter can bring to the table. It's super weird, I agree (I was just in Guatemala, for example, and every restaurant had a portable reader they'd bring to the table), but I would imagine replacing POS systems again -- remember, we got chip card readers later than a lot of the rest of the world -- is annoying.

Table-service restaurants always take your card (Not sure if they support chip and/or contactless), but most other services support chip and contactless. (2025, NC). This wasn't true in my experience until a few years ago. We lag Europe by 5+ years on payment techs. E.g. chip, contactless. There's a coffee shop holdout near me that was magstrip only until a few weeks ago.

i don't know why you'd think that. I don't live in a major metropolitan area and have used contactless payments for everything for the last 5-6 years.

Vet, grocery store, fedex/ups, pharmacy, restaurants, retail.