Starting in 2018, big boy credit card companies including MasterCard, Discover, and American Express will finally cease requiring cardmembers to sign their receipts after a credit card purchase.
Why? Because why did we ever need to in the first place?
Seriously though: why?
The whole point of signing credit card receipts is for identity verification purposes. See, back in the dark ages, merchants would compare the signature on the back of a credit card with the signature on a receipt to make sure no funny business was going on.
But a lot of people don’t sign the back of their CC’s anymore — and with new technology like EMV chips (and with online shopping leaving brick and mortar purchases in the dust), merchants no longer feel an absent signature poses a liability issue.
That’s all it is: a safety measure that allows merchants to keep their $500 that a fraudster spent on a new sofa with Sad Sam’s credit card.
The dawn of a new age
People have been scoffing at receipt sigs for nearly a decade, and this move will bring a good 12 seconds of lost time back into our lives each day. Seconds that we could be spending with our families…
Now, if only Visa would get off their high horse and join the club.