My friend's terrific holiday luck.

An ATM card could only be used at an ATM to withdraw funds (with a PIN number). They were mostly (perhaps entirely) replaced by debit cards. ATM cards did not have a brand logo such as Visa or MasterCard, since they were not connected to anything but your bank account.

Debit cards can be used for transactions at the register without using a PIN number, but only by running the card as credit instead of debit. Most of the time this can be accomplished by pressing "cancel" on the PIN screen, as the screen will read "enter PIN or press cancel for credit". Based on your tenuous grasp of the English language, I'd wager you have been pressing the cancel button, not enter.

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