It seems highly unlikely that the retailers are designing the system to compete with ApplePay, but rather are designing it to remove credit card issuers as the middlemen in the payments. This may seem like long ago, but people used to pay for goods with cash and checks, with credit cards a distant third. That situation has been reversed, with credit cards now well in the lead, and retailers no longer want to pay anywhere from 1-1/2% to 3-1/2% or more to card issuers for handling payments, preferring to either keep some of that to lower prices or raise profits. When you compare the cost of a credit card transaction to the cost of ACH ($2.50 per transaction per $100 to as low as $0.05 per transaction fixed ), you can see why retailers want to cut out credit card companies from the transaction.
While it is ungainly what the retailers are planning, Apple jumped into bed with the card companies, probably because it pays the lowest rate on its card transactions already, so the retailers are left trying to reclaim their position in payments that they had long ago ceded. Personally, while ApplePay seems very convenient, I would much rather not be paying banks and other card issuers their discount fee for my purchases. I just wish that the retail community had the backing of a company like Apple to do their work for them to achieve a more elegant solution.
