This is that stupid Visa commercial where everyone is moving smoothly, like the little cogs in the capatalist machine that they are, getting their food pellets and paying using their track-your-purchases-sell-your-data-while-opening-you-to -identity-theft-and-making-your-our-debt-slave-Visa card. Then some free thinker uses cash to pay and it gums up the whole thing. Anarchy is introduced until he moves along…
Beyond the whole socio-political bent above, the thing that actual bugs me is that it is complete bullshit. Paying with a card? You might as well pay with pennies and count them out. Everytime I’m getting coffee or a sandwich or something and someone pulls out a credit card for a $1.75 item, it makes me crazy while I sit and watch them run it through, wait for the stupid thing to print out, find a pen and then sign it. Meanwhile, everyone else in the line has their cash in hand, ready to pay, and the cashier can make change much, much faster.
Commercials aren’t written by the brightest writers in the cosmos, but the hidden message in the Visa commercial is that they’re beta-testing contactless cards that will supposedly be the credit equivalent of Fas-Trak on tollways. That particular technology is quietly going into beta in your state.
The contactless Visa cards are being directly marketed to merchant customers of Wells Fargo and First USA/Chase, etc. Financial services firm count as the worst industry when it comes to marketing, so it’ll take a while for this to catch on. Most likely a PayPal or upstart will beat the banks to the punch on this, motivated by statistics on impulse shopping accounting for faster spending. None of this will happen soon because it will require lots of infrastructure upgrades among retailers, hence the commercials that irritate you.
[removed the last paragraph from this comment, because it contained a personal message]
If you look at around :23 in, you see that they are still swiping cards, although it does look like the cards are slightly different than existing cards. However, you have to pause the video to do that, so it seems that if they are trying to promote some new card system, they’re doing a pretty poor job of it 🙂
There was an older commercial where this guy is walking around a grocery store stuffing food into his pockets and as he walks out the door, the security gaurd stops him because he forgot his receipt. As far as advertising a similar system, that was way more effective.