JCPenney Removes Apple Pay Support From Its Retail Stores and Mobile App [Updated]

[MadeTheSwitch]

I don't think most JCPs are going to be left around as derelict buildings, the two around here I can think of, one is in the Mall of America, so that's going to be taken up with something hopefully much nicer, and the other one is in the mall in the wealthy suburbs, and that one is being turned into the de facto flagship Lifetime Fitness (they are headquartered here).

Good riddance I say. Cheap crap and junky stores.

You can’t possibly know that will happen everywhere though. Each area is different. Stores have sat empty in the past for YEARS creating a blight in cities. Where I live a mall that I used to work at lost it's Sears first. It sat empty for awhile before the mall decided to tear down just half of the mall and remake into an open air mall and leave the rest.

This construction started a cascade though. They then next lost their JC Penny’s, followed by Macy’s who pulled out too leaving them absolutely no department store at all and throwing their entire plans into disaster. So they abandoned their plans and now it sits dormant with an empty vacant field where half of the mall used to be that they tore down, and the other half an empty ghost town with two big department stores sitting empty. For years.

 

[lartola]

How can a store remove Apple Pay? It’s the same contactless tech we’ve been using for 15 yrs?

Not in the US. There, contactless payment really only started in 2014 when apple pay launched. And what stores actually do is disable is the contactless payment tech. They turn off all the contactless readers and stop receiving ALL forms of contactless payment down to contactless cards, not just apple pay.
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Apple takes 0.15% of the total purchase when you use Apple Pay. I believe that’s on top of the credit card company’s fee.

No the 0.15% fee is paid by the banks, not the merchants. If Apple were charging the merchants a fee, they would have made sure apple pay required specific support so that no merchant could accept apple pay without paying the fee to Apple (and apple is extremely harsh when it comes to putting restrictions in place to ensure their fees or avoid lawsuits). That’s definitely not the case and apple pay can indeed be accepted by millions of merchants in countries where it hasn’t been officially launched.
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Where did you get this? Apple says they don’t charge the merchant any fees.

but they do charge the banks. And that’s about as much as they charge them: 0.15%
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My best guess: Apple was trying to hike fees and milk them some more - and since JCP are already not doing great, they had to call it quits.

No, JCPenney already explained it: There was a deadline set by Visa, april 13th 2019, for all merchants accepting contactless in the US to migrate from magnetic stripe emulation contactless to the more secure EMV contactless. Since JCPenney is not doing well, they decided not to invest in making that upgrade and turned off all NFC readers instead. What I don’t get is why they also removed apple pay from their app and website. That was a really stupid and ignorant move since apple pay online and in apps is a different animal and doesn’t use NFC.

Also, just so you and everyone else in this forum knows, APPLE DOES NOT CHARGE MERCHANTS ANY FEES TO LET THEM ACCEPT APPLE PAY. Proof of this is the fact that merchants accepting contactless payment in countries where apple pay isn’t supported by any of the banks are still able to accept apple pay from users who set it up with cards from banks in apple pay supporting countries. Apple does charge a fee to the card issuing banks (rumors say 0.15%) to let their account holders add their cards to apple pay.
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This probably had something to do with the lack of usage or the terminals/transactions costing them money and it wasn't worth it to them. It's not like teens shop at JC Penny anyway so I'd bet low usage.
The fact that this guy felt the need to take it to Twitter is weird, does he really think using his credit card is not safe anymore because I can bet he swipes that way more than he can use Apple Pay. Get over it dude.

No it had to do with a required upgrade to continue accepting contactless costing money and them not wanting to invest in it because they’re not doing well. JCPenney already explained that and the article above was updated to reflect it.
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Apple charges a 0.15% fee to payment networks which often gets passed down to Merchants even though Apple says it doesn't charge merchants any fees. And Apple Pay isn't just contactless, it generates a secure authorization code for that specific purchase instead of the CC number.

No they don’t charge the payment networks, they charge the card issuers (usually banks) for letting their cardholders add their cards to apple pay.

 

[rufwork]

Since JCPenney is not doing well, they decided not to invest in making that upgrade and turned off all NFC readers instead.

We have a winner. If you were two steps from bankruptcy, the bill to support contactless payments wouldn't be real high on your priority list.

And just to reach for another Apple connection, remember (though few would've called JCP a growth stock) you've got Apple's Ron Johnson at least partially to blame for JCP's current state of affairs. https://www.cnet.com/news/j-c-penney-apologizes-for-former-apple-execs-moves/

 

[Alan Wynn]

And just to reach for another Apple connection, remember (though few would've called JCP a growth stock) you've got Apple's Ron Johnson at least partially to blame for JCP's current state of affairs. https://www.cnet.com/news/j-c-penney-apologizes-for-former-apple-execs-moves/

Actually, Ron Johnson had a strategy that made a lot of sense. It required having some fortitude, something the JCP board did not have. He acknowledged that there would be losses during the transition and stated up front that it would take a few quarters to see through. Unfortunately, they panicked and stopped it too soon. Giving them all the downside, but without any possibility of the upside.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether it would have worked, but it was not given a full chance.

 

[rufwork]

Reasonable people can disagree on whether it would have worked, but it was not given a full chance.

I'm pretty sure Johnson had no idea who Penney's customers were. He was trying to invent/attract a new type of customer from scratch, one with no historical attraction to Penney. It was almost a Mozilla from Netscape situation... Let's start over!

The problem with starting over like that is that there's a middle ground where you have neither the old or the new, and the market passes you by. You don't take a community of coupon clippers and deal hunters, tell them that way of life is dead, & expect them to stick around.

But you're absolutely right. What JCP did was the worst of all worlds. They stuck with Johnson just long enough to torpedo the coupon community without waiting to attract Johnson's new clientele. Brilliant. /sigh

And now they don't have the resources to implement contactless payments, among many other things. It's a sad state of affairs.

 

[Alan Wynn]

I'm pretty sure Johnson had no idea who Penney's customers were.

He knew who their customers had been, but his issues was they were old and dying.

He was trying to invent/attract a new type of customer from scratch, one with no historical attraction to Penney.

As well as some who remembered JC Penny from when they were younger but had not been in years.

But you're absolutely right. What JCP did was the worst of all worlds. They stuck with Johnson just long enough to torpedo the coupon community without waiting to attract Johnson's new clientele. Brilliant. /sigh

Yup. That was the problem. Again, as you mentioned, his strategy might not have worked (given what he did at Target and Apple, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt), but their strategy was a disaster.

And now they don't have the resources to implement contactless payments, among many other things. It's a sad state of affairs.

Very sad. Just like Sears. They should have been Amazon, but now are likely not to survive at all. :-(

 

[hellopupy]

I disagree. By the time we, USA, adopted chipped credit cards, EU had already moved on to contactless payments. In fact, although all of my credit cards are chipped, I've never been given the opportunity to set up a pin to make it hard to use if stolen. Still authenticating with a signature in stores because their POS terminals are so old that they apparently can't be programmed to not require it. This despite the fact that all the the credit card companies no longer require signatures for transactions (not 100% certain its all but certainly most). Nope, I envy AU and the EU for taking the lead on this. It's all about preventing fraud for them. In America, the credit card companies would rather eat the fraud losses than agree to make a standardized secure POS terminal.

If you want to disagree that standardization harms innovation, be my guest but you'd be wrong.

Anecdotes, feelings, and personal preferences doesn't change the fact.