Fresno merchants lag in readiness to handle ‘smart cards’

A canvass of about 40 merchants and restaurants at northwest Fresno’s popular Fig Garden Village shopping center last week revealed that half have not yet installed new card readers capable of processing transactions with the new “smart-card” technology. Nearly a dozen others have updated readers installed – but not activated – at their checkout counters. Of the businesses visited by The Bee, only nine had their chip-card readers fully active to process transactions.