Like many others, I stopped off to pick up a little bubbly to celebrate New Year’s Eve. It was a few hours before closing. The store was busy, but not bad. I wandered around for a little bit to try and find something nice. I picked up two bottles of a sparkling wine that Kim had recommended and went to check out.

The cashier swiped my card through the card reader and it didn’t work. She tried a few more times and asked another person to help her. He didn’t have much better luck so they called a manager over. He tried swiping the card through the reader and didn’t have any luck. He asked if I had a different card. I told him I didn’t I asked if he could manually enter it, and he said he couldn’t.

This struck me as odd. I know that the magnetic strip on my card is starting to wear thin. There have been a handful of stores whose reader can’t read it. Sometimes, they put the card in a plastic shopping bag, which usually does the trick. If it doesn’t, they manually enter the card number. I’ve never had the situation where I couldn’t ultimately use my card, until New Year’s Eve.

I ended up leaving without any sparkling wine. Their intransigence lost them a sale. When I got home and told the story to my wife and some friends, my wife said she knew someone there and she would contact them.

Today, she sent an email and received the following response:

My apologies on your husbands experience.
However, if a credit card or debit card does not swipe it can not be validated that the card was in fact in the store if the charge was ever disputed. That obviously would not be the case here, but it's protection against any fraudulent charges.
If the card number is entered manually there is no protection for that. The swipe can be tracked.
There is no doubt that the funds are the account and that was never in question, it is a protection policy against credit card fraud.

Our cashiers are trained to let a manager know if a credit card doesn't swipe through the system. They know they are not allowed to enter it manually.

This struck as particularly odd. As I mentioned, no other store has ever refused to manually enter the credit card number. So, I contacted some experts in bank fraud. They responded:

Hey, the store owner is wrong. Cards can be manually entered and still not liable for fraud. Swiped transactions give merchants more protection, but they're still protected if they manually enter the info correctly. Sounds like this merchant is over interpreting the reg and being extra cautious.

So, I will be extra cautious from now on as well. I will not shop at Amity Wines and I will discourage others from possibly running into similar experiences.

While I’m at it, I’ll also contact Webster’s bank to get a replacement card with a new magnetic strip. When I’ve had banking issues, their customer service has always been exemplary.

Update 1/3/2014:

A friend sent me Card Acceptance Guidelines for Visa Merchants

Starting on page 19 the document fairly clearly contradicts what the person at Amity Wines claimed.

In traditional sales environments, merchants are required to take all reasonable steps to assure that the card, cardholder, and transaction are legitimate . Proper card acceptance begins and ends with sales staff and is critical to customer satisfaction and profitability.

Later, in the section about what to do when a card doesn't swipe, it goes into detail about making an imprint to show that the card was in the store to protect against possible chargebacks.