Smaller places in the USA will still bust out the carbon copy machine during outages, but they then have to bitch at the processor to get lower fees (often the fees are higher for non-instantly verified transactions).
That can't be true anymore, at least not the carbon copy part: None of my US credit cards are even still embossed in the way necessary for them to work in these.
Merchants can just note down the card number and manually charge it, though. I've definitely had that happen in the past somewhere. The downside is that the merchant is fully on the hook for chargebacks for such payments.
