Credit Cards

The reason credit cards have the white strip on the back for a signature is that when you (or the person using your card) try to purchase something, it is compared with the signature on the receipt. This doesn't work if the stores don't check the signature. And I don't mean the employee doesn't compare, I mean s/he doesn't even have you sign anything. Stores save receipts (or they're supposed to), so if it really came down to it, they could check the receipts for the signature.

When I worked at Express, I had to compare the signature on the credit card to the signature on the receipt. I was told that I had to compare both, even if I saw a driver's license, that technically wasn't good enough. In case you live on mars, driver's licenses have names and pictures. I personally think it's a lot easier to compare faces than written names.

Since I'm bitching about this, you've probably figured out that I've had some experiences with I was not asked to sign.

First, when you pay at the pump to purchase gas, there is no way to verify your signature. I've always thought this was a little fishy, but even if your card is stolen, how much gas can a person buy before you'd notice your card was gone (of course with the cost of gas these days, $100 is very probable)?

Last week, when I went to the UA movie theater in King of Prussia, I was not asked to sign. The same thing happend at the the Regal (which is under the same company as UA) in Edgemont. What pisses me off even more is that they give me the receipt with the signature line that says "customer copy" (possibly even the one that says "merchant copy") as well as a regular receipt. Why are they giving me useless shit? This makes it even harder to find and determine which little piece of paper is my damn ticket to get into the movie.