In the UK the credit / debit cards I've had issued in the last few years have been flat, with details just printed, so that level of manual processing is presumably defunct here.
Don't forget chip & PIN is state of the art novel tech in the US. (From memory I think it was required here in the UK from Valentine's day^ in something like 2005.)
(^I remember the day better than the year because the ad campaign was something like 'I <3 PIN'.)
that is mostly because major US retailers sued Visa/Mastercard to make it not enforceable via lower interchange fees, since then they would have to change tens of thousands of point-of-sale systems at each one
