Sans Lapins

There’s certainly enough French news and commentary on what’s called la crise économique, la crise financière, or simply la crise. Just like in the States, no one is sure when it will end, where it will hit the worst, and what’s going to happen next week.

In comparison with that, the credit “crisis” I’m talking about is quite a bit smaller. It’s the “crisis” of French credit cards.

Since the early nineties, the French bank system switched to using cards with microchips in them to help prevent fraud. Much like a debit card, these cartes bancaires à puce don’t require a signature — just stick your card in a little machine, enter your PIN number, and voilà.

For the French, this is wonderful. For American tourists, it’s a pain because it renders unavailable a lot of the automated payment machines that require chip-enabled credit cards, everything from buying train tickets to those ubiquitous rental bikes you may have heard about.

As Canada and most of Europe switch to this new “chip-and-PIN” credit card, Americans are increasingly being in the cold.

Let’s hope that the larger financial crisis comes to an end quickly, and that American banks start issuing credit cards that work in other countries. That is, if there are any American banks left.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under La Vie Paris, Random thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.