Swiping and signing is heck of a lot faster than figuring out which to insert the card in this particular terminal, waiting for the damn machine wade through its various phases and navigating through a couple of menus, and eventually entering the PIN code followed by the green enter key.
But that's not the real problem, in my opinion.
With hand-written signatures I was pretty sure that if someone stole my card then with great certainty he couldn't replicate my signature in a way a professional hard-writing analyst could be fooled. Thus, I would have some buffer of justice against the period between stealing my card and informing the bank about it. They could just run the signatures and I would have a pretty strong proof that someone else counterfeited my signature.
With PIN code it's different. As soon as someone types in the correct PIN code, everything is kosher and validated. I can't prove it wasn't me. It doesn't really matter that you're supposedly the only one who knows the PIN code because it's dead easy to eavesdrop and then you're out of luck.
> Swiping and signing is heck of a lot faster than figuring out which to insert the card in this particular terminal
Well, there's always the issue of unfamiliar terminals, but that's a question of habit. I, for one, can complete a chip+pin transaction faster than most terminals can print a slip for signing.
What country are you in? The machines in Zurich pretty much always take 8-10 seconds just to get around to asking for a PIN, then a further 5 seconds to confirm. This, in a reasonably wired city where both my bank and the merchant's bank are a couple blocks down the street. At grocery stores in North America, I usually swipe the card, sign the screen, and have a receipt in under 5 seconds.
The screen-signing solution is very fast - I was talking about paper-signing.
I'm in the UK now, but I'm talking about Denmark. I'm probably pretty biased by my experience with my Danish chip-card that still requires a signature here. I'm often asked by confused checkout assistants if I have a pen. Not fast.
In the beginning, when the chip-cards were rolled out in Denmark, they were very slow, on the scale of what you're describing, but it's much faster now.
Agreed, most terminals I use are pretty quick - certainly a lot faster than waiting for a bit of paper to be printed, singing it and then the bits of paper torn apart.
But that's not the real problem, in my opinion.
With hand-written signatures I was pretty sure that if someone stole my card then with great certainty he couldn't replicate my signature in a way a professional hard-writing analyst could be fooled. Thus, I would have some buffer of justice against the period between stealing my card and informing the bank about it. They could just run the signatures and I would have a pretty strong proof that someone else counterfeited my signature.
With PIN code it's different. As soon as someone types in the correct PIN code, everything is kosher and validated. I can't prove it wasn't me. It doesn't really matter that you're supposedly the only one who knows the PIN code because it's dead easy to eavesdrop and then you're out of luck.