The Dairy Queen I stopped by today used a mag strip reader but it is becoming increasingly uncommon. The local grocery store had to revert to using it twice last year when there was something wrong with the chip approval process. This was on all registers so I don't think it was the readers themselves that were the issue unless perhaps they had received a bad update that was later corrected.
But it does seem like the more secure these systems are getting, the less robust they are. Perhaps that's just one of the tradeoffs we have to accept. The college football season started with a game between Nebraska and Illinois in Dublin, Ireland. The beer at the game was free because there was a technical issue with the payment provider. Being a "cashless stadium", they simply had no way of accepting payment.
My recent cards (and not only mine, I saw that happen with others people cards too) just tell the terminal they can't be used by a mag stripe at all. I assume what the terminal without a smartcard/payless should allow a mag strip read, but I haven't seen them for like... 10 years? But I'm not in the US of A, for that matter.
But it does seem like the more secure these systems are getting, the less robust they are. Perhaps that's just one of the tradeoffs we have to accept. The college football season started with a game between Nebraska and Illinois in Dublin, Ireland. The beer at the game was free because there was a technical issue with the payment provider. Being a "cashless stadium", they simply had no way of accepting payment.