Is migration to EMV "costly and burdensome" ... or "highly affordable"?

This depends on whom you're asking, apparently. Today the American Bankers Association and NACS issued dueling press releases in conjunction with a  U.S. House of Representatives Small Business Committee hearing, "The EMV Deadline and What it Means for Small Businesses."

Reading their statements is a bit like watching "Rashomon," the classic Japanese film in which the characters recount events from points of view so radically opposed, they seem to be telling entirely different stories.  

There's the NACS view:

Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business, Jared Scheeler, managing director of The Hub Convenience Stores Inc., indicated that it has cost his chain of four North Dakota convenience stores $134,500 to date to install point-of-sale and pump card readers that accept EMV chip transactions. The average transition cost is more than $26,000 per store, compared with an average profit of $47,000 per year ...

'As a small business, the transition to EMV has been a costly and burdensome undertaking. It does not appear that the card companies took into consideration the realities of operating a small business when they came up with their transition plans," asserted Scheeler.

Moreover, the card companies failed to require chip-and-PIN technology, a 'simple and very effective security measure' that they promote abroad and 'would substantially reduce fraud losses for everyone, including small business owners,' [Scheeler said.]

And there's the ABA view:

The shift to EMV technology is highly affordable for retailers and provides an extra layer of protection both for them and their customers. Chip readers start at $29 and some incentives offered by banks and others make them free. Merchants also often get the bonus of being able to accept popular mobile payment options like ApplePay with their upgraded hardware. ...

The financial services community is hard at work on innovative future technologies like tokenization, encryption and biometrics while the retail lobby remains fixated on a static technology (PINs) that only addresses a small and steadily declining share of fraud. The high profile retail data breaches that compromised millions of Americans' card accounts weren't caused by petty thieves snatching cards out of wallets — they were caused by criminals exploiting gaps in retailers' systems. 

Finally, there is the House Small Business Committee view — a story that remains to be told.