The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast.
Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don’t look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases—and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia.
But signatures didn’t die.
We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit—even when there is no blank space for it—because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say.
“Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.
I don’t think I’ve ever signed anything when a card is involved. Cheques back when they were a thing, sure, but they were all but irrelevant fifteen years ago.
I think cheques were almost irrelevant in the 90s already. For sure I remember the two things I had to write a cheque for. DVLA for the olde tax disk every year, and the speeding fine I got in 1996.
Until around 2005, I was using my 1994 issued chequebook, crossing out the 19, initialling the change and writing in the full year.
I still have the chequebook issued in 2005 to this day.
Drag disagrees. Drag thinks they were actually very few things but irrelevant fifteen years ago. Perhaps in addition to being “irrelevant” they were also “old fashioned” and “pointless”. But not much else. Mostly just irrelevant.
Odd idiom to take issue with…
Drag speculates that 200 years ago some bad writer mixed up “nothing but” for “all but” and now we’re dealing with the consequences because nobody since then has bothered to do any critical thinking. It’s a very simple problem with a very simple solution.