The merchants are the ones calling for chip-and-PIN. What they are whining about is high interchange fees, and their whining is entirely justified. Visa &amp; the rest of the credit card industry is a racket, an extra sales tax on all retail with the proceeds going to a handful of very rich people.<p>Merchants are furious about the required upgrade to a chip-and-signature system which requires them to pay for expensive upgrades to all their POS machines and is much slower to validate than swiped cards, but leaves high interchange fees and doesn’t appreciably bring down their fraud liability.