Comment by tallanvor

Keep in mind that inertia is a thing. Businesses used to have to make an impression on your card on carbon copy paper and physically send the slips in to be processed. When they started swiping cards, restaurants would only have one terminal and it had to be connected to a phone line to work. Both of these situations made it common for you to hand your card to the waiter (usually in the book they brought the check) because they couldn't do it at the table.

Credit cards caught on later in other parts of the world, and they benefited from having more modern options with regards to the equipment used. Governments and banks also did more to mandate the use of security features (chip & pin) than in the US - American banks like people using credit cards - it makes them a lot of money and they're incentivized to keep the barriers low as long as the amount of fraud is manageable to them.