Bigoted fast food eaters get come-up-ance.

[Hauldren Collider]

I read somewhere that a huge percentage of credit card fraud is caught early when the culprits buy two tanks of gas and then buy two pairs of shoes (one for me, one for a friend)

There's sort of two classes of credit card fraud. The must mundane kind is something like a purse slashing or pickpocketing or something, someone steals a credit card and then they often go to some retail store where they have a friend who is a clerk and the clerk runs the card and gives them cash from the register. This is usually pretty easy to figure out. Similar to a bank robbery, it's pretty easy to get away with once. As soon as you do it a second time, you're extremely likely to get caught. And like bank robbery nobody actually makes a living doing this. They're petty thieves and they're gonna end up in jail real real quick.

Here's the second, more sophisticated way: Someone steals a credit card number, and sells it to a credit card number wholesaler. There's a huge and complicated secondary market on the internet for stolen credit card numbers. Thieves get the numbers, then sell them to the people who package them and sell them to the people that then use them to actually steal stuff. Some people make a living doing this but rarely the people on the number collection end of it. That part from what I understand can work a couple of ways: The most common way is some service worker (stereotypical example being a waiter) gets a credit card to pay for something, but before swiping it on the vendor's card reader, he swipes it on his own reader and keeps the number and then after he's kept several he sells them as a package to a wholesaler. There's actually market price for stolen credit card numbers, amusingly they're bought and traded much like a financial instrument. The restaurant worker example is usually found out pretty quick, since as soon as the stolen numbers are used and the card owners report the fraudulent charges the bank will notice that all of them are coming from the same place and notify the vendor. Doesn't stop people from trying it. Other ways involve hacking like in the Target and Chik Fil A case.

In all these circumstances the perpetrators end up being found out and defeated fairly quickly by basic statistics. Still, it's a major cost to card companies and vendors. I think that banks would probably like to force vendors to update all their cardreaders, since it costs them a lot of money--US cards are actually more valuable on the aforementioned stolen number market than European cards because of the relative lack of security. However the risk to the consumer is actually fairly low, since for the most part banks, card companies and vendors are the ones who eat the cost.

Take with a grain of salt since I could be wrong about a lot of this, most of this is just stuff I've heard secondhand from friends who work at banks.

EDIT: Oh yeah I think part of the reason US cards are more valuable is because for some reason the transaction takes longer to approve (and consequently decline) when the card gets used overseas, but I'm not sure

[Lorizael]

I wouldn't say CFA is the best fast-food option, but there are far worse, and I think most of the hate it gets here is due to politics rather than the food's actual quality. Also, whenever I go to a Burger King/KFC/wherever, everybody has this look on his face that says, "I'd really like to kill myself. And I have this whole restaurant full of knives, fire and cleaning chemicals to do it with. But I'm too tired, dull and dispirited to work out the details, so instead I'll be really sloppy with your order." I've never been to a CFA like that.

Regardless of political leanings, it's just mediocre fast-food. It can't be delicious unless you're starving and/or drunk.

[Dinner]

When are you silly Americans going to start using chip technology in your credit/debit cards, and impose laws that restrict corporate data mining? Society would like both. Industry would hate the latter, but it should be done.

Several democrats have been trying to do that for at least a decade but Republicans have opposed it mainly due to lobbying by the financial industry which who doesn't want to pay for an updated systematic. Make all the companies personally liable for damages and watch them change their tunes.

Not that corrupt Republicans would ever let such common sense reform pass. Hell, the Dems are also corruptly bought and paid for as well.

[Elok]

Regardless of political leanings, it's just mediocre fast-food. It can't be delicious unless you're starving and/or drunk.

Delicious? I suppose not. But what's your frame of reference here? Guy once told me that there are better FF options, citing several. Panera is the only one I recognized (yeah, I live in the sticks), and it is better--but I don't think of Panera as really in the same tier as CFA. They're much more hoity-toity, and IIRC they have prices to match. I see CFA as competing more with the Hardees and Taco Bell types, and it beats the hell out of them. The food at those places barely resembles food; it's more a slurry of industrially-processed fats, carbs, and sodium. A CFA sandwich has real lettuce, not iceberg, and I've never had it come limp or spotty or otherwise gross. Likewise the tomato isn't underripe or overripe or anemic. The chicken isn't dry (I've heard complaints that it is, but in my experience it's always been decently moist), or mangled, or weird. It looks like . . . white meat. The bun is underwhelming, but never compressed. The pickles, I grant you, suck. A CFA sandwich looks, and tastes, like somebody gave a damn while making it. That doesn't make it haute cuisine or anything, but it's not "mediocre" FF in my book.

[Hauldren Collider]

Several democrats have been trying to do that for at least a decade but Republicans have opposed it mainly due to lobbying by the financial industry which who doesn't want to pay for an updated systematic. Make all the companies personally liable for damages and watch them change their tunes.

Not that corrupt Republicans would ever let such common sense reform pass. Hell, the Dems are also corruptly bought and paid for as well.

I think you're pretty wrong about this. Fraud is a huge expense to banks. They'd love it if we could make credit cards more secure. The problem is not the banks, the problem is the vendors who don't want to pay to update their cash registers.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Oerdin really would sound less of a kook if he didn't say such obviously false crap like that Chick-Fil-A is "really crappy". Mind your bias (liberal privilege?)

Anyway, I've been eating at Chick-Fil-A again. Boycotts for mere difference of opinions are stupid (boycotts for more harmful stuff like funding ex-gay therapy are fine, but that policy has been rectified, now they are just against gay marriage, which yeah, I'm not boycotting anyone because of).

[Patroklos]

Of the three credit cards I have two have chips . It appears the card makers are moving forward without the vendors in some cases.

When I was on vacation in Africa every vendor had to run their card in front of the customer. Waiters bring the card reader to your table and your card never leaves your sight. They did not, however, use the chips.

[Dinner]

Oerdin really would sound less of a kook if he didn't say such obviously false crap like that Chick-Fil-A is "really crappy". Mind your bias (liberal privilege?)

How are they not crappy? I have dozens of better, more tasty, and equally priced options so why have yet another over salted, frozen, the deep fried processed chicken... Thing?

For $5 to $10 (and often less) I could get Iraqi kabobs with a full meal deal, a whole thing of freshly prepared and well made tacos, either Vietnamese pho or banh mi, an excellent organic fresh never frozen burger meal, a wonderful Italian pasta with shellfish, caveche, fresh house made hot dog meal(sausage ground in house), all you can eat vegetarian meal, Indian, Korean, chinese, or a bunch of other stuff. All will be made fresh in house, mostly not be processed but made from actual fresh food, won't have so much salt it would make a horse gag, and be both extremely competitively priced and convenient to my location. So how is Chick Fil A not crap compared to that?

If I am going to eat something deep fried I would rather have a fish and chips cooked on the dock side and made from a fish caught by a local fisherman that morning and served with a house made tarter sauce. That is also a price competitive option which is superior.

[Elok]

So by "really crappy" you mean "not artisanally prepared to suit my cosmopolitan tastes," i.e. it's fast food. Yes. Yes, it is. The point of chain fast food is to have a standardized product that can be prepared consistently, so wherever you go it's much the same. CFA plays by those rules rather better than their competition. Family is on vacation, needs something to eat, CFA is an acceptable option. Unless of course they vacation in SAN ****ING DIEGO, and talk to you about their food options beforehand--and it's their fault that they didn't, because why would you want to go anywhere else, or not talk to Dinner about fine dining? Tell you what, next time I'm on the road and I'm tempted to eat at CFA, I'll be sure to call you for the location of the nearest organic taco mart with a bidet-equipped bathroom.

Also, toting banh mi as "not processed" is kinda funny. Don't know how they do things in SD, but the wife tells me that in Vietnam they customarily load 'em down with horrifying amounts of compressed mystery meat product. And I doubt whether half the options you cited are what you would call low sodium.

[Dinner]

Hell, there are several places where I can get a good and large Sandwich, chips, and a soda for $5. That is pretty standard in most of America and you get to choose from several different types of sandwiches.

But we already knew Imran has bad taste because he actually thinks five frauds tastes good and is a good value with their $12 burger and fries meal with their dry ass, no juice in them, burned burger patties.

[Dinner]

Elok, all of those are fast casual type places which compete well on price and speed with traditional fast food. Even so, just in the fast food catagory itself, there are better options. Fresher, less processed, etc... ****, half of the food trucks in any decent city put crap like CFA to shame for the same price. Competition is a good thing.

[Elok]

Fascinating fact: some people choose to live outside the city, or travel to cities other than their own, and do not have the leisure to check Yelp or Urbanspoon for the location of the nearest free-range organic cruelty-free hypoallergenic gluten-suspicious whateverTF food truck, assuming they are in a place that has "food trucks" which will not give you three straight days of burning runny poops.

[Lorizael]

Man, I'm hungry.

[Dinner]

Fascinating fact: some people choose to live outside the city, or travel to cities other than their own, and do not have the leisure to check Yelp or Urbanspoon for the location of the nearest free-range organic cruelty-free hypoallergenic gluten-suspicious whateverTF food truck, assuming they are in a place that has "food trucks" which will not give you three straight days of burning runny poops.

Don't you have a smart phone? Restaurant review and finding apps are every where and it takes only a couple of minutes. Stop being stupid and pretending it is a hardship to find better food for a similar price.

[Elok]

Hell, there are several places where I can get a good and large Sandwich, chips, and a soda for $5. That is pretty standard in most of America and you get to choose from several different types of sandwiches.

1. I live in a pretty rural area, where prices are low, and I'd be mildly scared of anyplace that purported to sell that much for five. Even Subway isn't selling most of its footlongs for five anymore, let alone the other stuff. What animal are they getting the meat from, and how long ago?

2. You lose your foodie-douchebag card for admitting to drinking soda. I'm going to send this to your local Whole Foods, and now they won't let you back in until you dress up in Fair Trade sackcloth and flagellate your ass with a hemp rope until all the high-fructose-corn-syrup evil has bled out of you. Just don't let the blood flow into a storm drain, it might introduce artificial coloring into your local wetlands.