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.
