Doc Rock
Inspired
The newer, nicer, contactless readers cost $$$. Things that cost $$$ cut into profit. Business' attitude in this country, for the most part, is F*** the customer's (and retail employees') safety if it costs us a penny more....
Here Down Under, I think the banks have a say in what card readers are out there. They install them, but I'm not sure what costs there are to the businesses. But I travel to the USA a lot (or at least, did before the quarantine), and am always surprised that I either had to swipe my card, put in PINs, or even sign the docket (how old-fashioned and insecure is that?). Many places in the USA didn't seem to even know about chip-and-PIN cards, which we've had here for donkey's years, and have now gone almost everywhere to contactless. On my last trip, to Miami, I even had one shop use the old roll-over imprinter for my card. The sort of thing they had back in the 1980s. And there was me thinking the USA led the world in technology...!
But I would have thought that moving to contactless payment would have been obligatory in a pandemic like this?