- every restaurant PoS has to be updated to handle this use case;
- you have to wait for your server to make a second visit to your table before you can sign your tab and leave;
- every server has to spend extra time dealing with every table's tab upfront, rather than settling after close when no customers are inconvenienced by the time that takes;
- and all this cost and friction to reduce the incidence of a kind of low-value card-present fraud which is trivial for the customer to have reversed, and quite rare in all respects save the purely anecdotal.
If you're going to worry about any kind of payment card chicanery at a restaurant, the thing worth looking out for is skimming, not this.
- every restaurant PoS has to be updated to handle this use case;
- you have to wait for your server to make a second visit to your table before you can sign your tab and leave;
- every server has to spend extra time dealing with every table's tab upfront, rather than settling after close when no customers are inconvenienced by the time that takes;
- and all this cost and friction to reduce the incidence of a kind of low-value card-present fraud which is trivial for the customer to have reversed, and quite rare in all respects save the purely anecdotal.
If you're going to worry about any kind of payment card chicanery at a restaurant, the thing worth looking out for is skimming, not this.