I don't think chip and signature is a requirement - most places seem to ask for a PIN rather than a signature.
Just swiping the card, however, also works just fine and I now use it everywhere again because I can't be bothered to remember and type in yet another passcode. Just more friction in the process.
An increasing number of terminals now reject the swipe, with the screen stating something like "this card has a chip, please insert and wait". Cashiers are starting to ask, before you swipe, "does your card have a chip?" I even used a terminal yesterday where, after inserting the card, it asked me to identify whether my card was a "Citibank Card" or "Visa Debit Card" (ambiguous, since the card was a Citibank card with a Visa logo). The implementation of this chip rollout in the US is a mess.
The selection was because your card had multiple AID's on it. Some terminals still need some work, and sometimes configuration, to handle AID selection properly. The US Common Debit AID is still not widely supported, which is why many grocery stores still haven't rolled out Chip & PIN support - they don't want to pay the credit card interchange fees because their merchant or terminals don't support the debit AID.
So yes, the chip rollout here in the states is a giant clusterfuck for the time being. It will get better soon, once the hodgepodge of banks and hardware vendors get everything straightened out.
What about the October 2015 liability shift? If grocery stores "still haven't rolled out Chip & PIN support", then they face liability for counterfeit and lost or stolen cards. Issuers can conditionally allow fallback transactions [1], do you know if issuers are generally denying fallback transactions? Is the prompt "this card has a chip, please insert and wait" for a swipe on a card with a chip due to the merchant's policy to avoid the liability shift, or is it due to the issuer denying fallback?
The liability shift only matters if the potential loss outweighs the cost of running all transactions as credit until your issuing bank and hardware support the US Common Debit AID is greater than the potential fraud liability.
For a grocery store <1% per transaction and 3% per transaction is a pretty huge difference, one of my local stores that only takes debit cards still doesn't support chip cards because of the madness with the US Common Debit AID preventing them from enabling the EMV support on their terminals.
> most places seem to ask for a PIN rather than a signature
That is for debit, which is an entirely different thing than credit.
There are no US banks that implement Chip & PIN. Heck, it's nearly impossible to get a Chip & PIN capable card for travel if you have a US issuing bank.
Swipe support will in theory eventually be disabled (e.g. authorizations declined by your issuing bank) at some point in the future when Chip & Signature is being rolled out.
If you're typing your PIN code into a terminal in the US, you are using debit though.
> There are no US banks that implement Chip & PIN. Heck, it's nearly impossible to get a Chip & PIN capable card for travel if you have a US issuing bank.
Not entirely, but your last sentence is true. Some issuers do PIN credit cards. I have one from First Tech Federal Credit Union that uses PIN and touts it as a benefit. When I used it in Europe, it worked exactly as expected and prompted for my PIN just like in the States. There are a handful of smaller issuers that also do PIN primary (mostly credit unions but at least one Florida bank with a card catering to Cuban trade does) and a few more that have PINs but the PIN is secondary so it isn't asked for unless the terminal's configuration insists on it.
Here US, some stores when using a chip credit card (not debit/checking account btw) requires a pin instead of a signature, not sure if they call it a pin but it's 4 digits to verify purchases . . . instead of signature.
I have a MasterCard that takes a pin. I've been asked to enter the pin at several places, including WalMart. It is a credit card, not a debit card.
Frankly, I'm baffles by these claims that US cards don't work with chip and pin because so far, if I use the chip, I have been required to use the pin.
I also have a corporate amex with a pin set up, but I've never used it.
Just swiping the card, however, also works just fine and I now use it everywhere again because I can't be bothered to remember and type in yet another passcode. Just more friction in the process.