Wow, so these companies sold their soul, with exclusivity for 3 years, to an untested company/system, all in order to save a measly 2% on credit card fees? Don't mean to bring the issue of executive pay up, but who are these retailers hiring as executives to make such stupid decisions? This would be bad enough if there wasn't an upfront payment involved, but they need to put in half a million?
That's money out the door they ain't ever going to get back (not to mention, many of them won't get the future revenue of the people who already aren't going to buy from them anymore since they seem to want to not make it easier to pay). All that goodwill CVS had from removing tobacco from the shelves...that's now gone.
Sure, Apple Pay is new. But from a company that is known to bring out innovative new products that work, and have turned industries upside down for the better. Remember MP3 players pre iPod? Computers pre-mouse and GUI? Smartphones pre-iPhone? The history is there, at least.
Separate from the turning off of the NFC, I was actually interested to hear in how this consortium's mobile payments were going to work. It's a non-starter for me and most, and this will, as others have mentioned, fail and fairly quickly.
I need to give up my SSN, drivers license # and bank account info. to be floated in the cloud somewhere (beauty of Apple Pay is that info. doesn't need to float around). QR code scanners? Forget just for a second the insecurity of it all, now I have to give up paying by credit card and earning rewards? And I need to make sure there is enough money in my account at that moment to make any [expected or unexpected] transactions. All for the benefit of saving CVS et. all a couple of percent on a transaction, and perhaps some sort of [unknown] discount that may or may not even be relevant to me? Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.
What is interesting is that Target is both an Apple Pay partner (for online) and part of this consortium (presumably for in-store). In the store this past week, noticed that they have NFC terminals that are not turned on (but unlike CVS/Rite Aid, at least I don't believe they ever were). Wonder how that will work out.