USA was very late to adopt chip/tap terminals, even relative to Canada. I could be wrong but IIRC it was only when Apple Pay came along that tap-enabled terminals began to hit critical mass.
It's always incredible to see few people in the US uses the tech that's available until Apple makes it a thing, and seeing that play out over and over.
This is the same everywhere though. See, e.g. incredibly late fibre rollout in many well off EU countries because they already had copper in the ground everywhere vs. developing countries that never had that legacy infrastructure inertia.
What I'm talking about is a lot of those terminals supported tap to pay well before Apple Pay became a thing. The infrastructure was there, the technology was there, you could use it if you cared to do so. Most people just didn't know it was even an option. Google Wallet supported tap to pay years before Apple Pay was even announced. Tap to pay credit cards existed years before then. Nobody gave a shit about the technology until Apple announced Apple Pay and suddenly it became a big deal for vendors to actually check if their POS systems had it enabled or not.
I remember using Google Wallet years before Apple pay existed. When Apple Pay was announced so many cashiers thought they didn't support tap to pay credit card transactions despite me using it at those locations for years. What was really annoying was a lot of vendors turned off the feature while they "investigated" supporting Apple Pay, and didn't turn it back on for another year or so after they slapped the Apple Pay logo on the exact same terminals.
