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I don’t shop too frequently at retail shops since I do most of my shopping either online or at Costco but this past week I visited many retail outlets to buy some x-mas gifts for family and I noted something new when paying.

In the past, the little card swipe device would prompt you to select Credit or Debit after you swiped your card or in some cases BEFORE you swiped your card.  Now, whenever I swiped my card, I was immediately prompted to enter my pin number.   I looked up at the clerk confused wondering why it was prompting me for a pin on a credit card and the clerk advised me to hit “Cancel” and select “Credit” at the next screen.  This happened at various retail outlets (Circuit City, ToysRus, etc) the exact same way.

There has been a battle for years over signature debit vs. pin debit vs. credit card charges and the fees vary greatly for retailers and banks.  If I understand the issue correctly, pin based debit purchases charge retailers as little as $0.12 where a credit or signature debit purchase would cost a retailer as much as 3% of the purchase.

Clearly, retailers have a monetary incentive to push consumers into using pin based debit and perhaps this is the reaction to all those cutesy mastercard and visa commercials portraying non-card users as losers.  Retailers are now defaulting to pin-based transactions on their card swipe terminals as you check out and it’s really annoying for me because hell would need to freeze over before I would ever conduct a pin-based debit transaction at a retailer.

On a side note, the retail experience continues to deteriorate rather badly.  I was in the market for two LCD TVs this year and I visited at least 6 stores trying to find the model I wanted.   After hours of fruitless searches, I settled for a single LCD TV and will wait until after the holidays for the second larger LCD I was looking for this holiday season.   I was also disappointed at not being able to find Nintendo DS at any of the dozen shops I visited either.   Luckily, I was able to purchase two Nintendo DS’s a couple of weeks ago online and those were safely delivered.   Apple iPod Nanos were plentiful but I was also unable to find quite a few other gifts: Stainles Steel Refrigerator with steel handles, a few Wii game titles, a few DS game titles, a few jewelry items, etc.

I’m working on a separate post titled, “Do Retailers Have It All Wrong?” to discuss a few issues I had with this year’s holiday shopping season.