[tiew9Vii]

Speaking of payment terminals.

Payment terminals used to have good UX, they all clearly showed you the price when paying. Tills had displays with the price facing the customer which were clearly visible.

Now traditional POS terminals have been replaced with tap and go devices by the latest fintech, non of them show the price to the customer by design. Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.

It's a deliberate design choice to withhold showing the price on these devices. It's cheap to add a small LCD panel to them, the technology previously existed and still exists however the choice have been made not to.

[willis936]

I was in awe of an old vending machine I saw in the Caribbean recently. I didn't want anything but I spent a few seconds just pushing buttons to check prices. The segmented display read out the price the very instant I touched the button for the item. There was no perceptible delay for a bloated software stack running on some cheap processor that waits for too many bits over a crappy cellular internet connection. Everything needed was right there, between the hard-coded logic and me.

[friendzis]

> Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.

I'm sorry, but it's a mandatory knee-jerk response here: "Is this something I'm too European to undestand?"

Even the the smallest, crappiest devices are required to have a line LCD to show the final price. Goes to show that consumer protection minimums do really set the bar for eventual exploitation.

[tiew9Vii]

It may be geographical.

In Australia, a lot of places only have a "Square Reader" on the counter where you pay. i.e. cafes, coffee shops, convenience stores, market stalls.

Terminals do exist with full displays but they are less common, mainly if you go to a restaurant as they have options for tipping on the display.

Just looking at the Square website the "Square Reader" is $69 vs $329 for the "Square Terminal". This may be part of the reason cafes etc prefer them given tight overheads.

Square reader: https://squareup.com/au/en/hardware/reader

[jabroni_salad]

I think your retailer has misconfigured their setup. Everywhere I tap against a puck, it is also accompanied by a screen. The puck is always just a plugin module as opposed to being integrated on the terminal.