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Nope.
Some units have a touch point that reads the chip on contact.
They are not real common and I usually see them on older small businesses.
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The problem is that upgrading doesn’t guarantee they will support contactless. Unless there is a card network mandate, those businesses will only be required to accept chip when the magnetic stripe is phased out. In fact, many restaurants in the US that already upgraded still don’t support contactless because they upgraded to chip by purchasing wired pinpads, which forced them to continue taking away people’s cards to process the payments, heavily limiting the use of contactless even if the pinpad did support the feature.
Photos would definitely be good if you could find them. I don't think I've ever seen those here in the US.
Turns out that more restaurants support contactless than we think, it's just that it's pretty much only for physical cards as it's the employees tapping for customers. You can tell they tapped for you as the receipt will say something like "Visa Cardholder" or similar instead of your name.
It's still not ideal, mind you, but it's not a simple matter of a significant portion of the US economy deciding to permanently be insert-only for reasons. If it were, I imagine there actually would be a contactless mandate eventually. As it is, from the perspective of Visa and MC, as long as physical cards seemingly "work", who cares about any of the other form factors?
They do care about the other “form factors” as you call them. Proof of that is that in most of the world, if not also in the US, the networks require that contactless payment with physical cards be capped to a certain amount, as opposed to having no caps when using a mobile wallet such as apple pay or google pay.
Maybe in other markets, sure, but it really does seem like the biggest (and possibly only) priority is that the US uses contactless at all. And to be honest, considering the US didn't even bother to try using it until the pandemic (and is still one of the world's lowest users of it, albeit increasing), that might have been the best decision compared to continuing to hope that people would start tapping their phones or watches.
No. To continue taking cards away can’t be the best decision under any circumstances. It may have been the easiest thing to do for the lazy american restaurant owners, but it can never be the best.
Best of bad choices, then.
Personally I'd rather contactless gets used at all than try to do what's "ideal" and end up getting nowhere. We can always improve things later. (Insert discussion about how likely that'll actually be.)
I doubt taking cards away actually achieves that. While some employees might occasionally run a card using tap, the chances of an employee running a card that way are very low. If someone has to take your card away at a restaurant, the odds are 100 to 1 that they’ll run it via chip or magstripe rather than contactless.
I eat out way more than I probably should and I actually find they tap my physical card for me pretty regularly. YMMV of course.
(And speaking of "regularly", I imagine sit-down dining isn't that common of an expense for a lot of people. I've always said that as long as people can use contactless at gas pumps and grocery stores, that probably accounts for most people's spending right there. With that in mind, even if almost no restaurant tapped cards for customers, it's not a stretch for most people to still think that contactless is "everywhere", or at least in enough places where it makes sense to try before inserting.)