I really don’t agree with that — at least not in the US. My experience in the US is the retailers simply don’t care about NFC/Apple Pay because virtually no consumers are asking for it and even those who prefer it aren’t taking enough of their business elsewhere (or there are no Apple Pay-supporting competitors) to warrant spending the money to support it.
I’ve stood in line at several local grocers, Panera, and Walgreens; all of whom support NFC, week-after-week, and watched people in line with an iPhone in hand reach into their purse or wallet to pull out their plastic card to complete the transaction. Americans are uninformed about the better security in NFC (many falsely believe that the "wireless"/contactless element actually makes it less secure) or are indifferent. Then again...I still see people who swipe first at an EMV-capable terminal...
Fully agree - I live in the outskirts of a large city in the Midwest, so things sometimes reach here much later than the rest of the US, but I'd say that 75-80% of my transactions are with various cards in Apple Pay. That remaining percent is a bit of utility bills, the random restaurant that takes the card and uses swipe/chip, or the occasional Sam's Club visit. Kroger and Walmart didn't really do it for me before all of this, and so the retailers I typically visit anyway have NFC enabled (Target, Meijer, Aldi, Trader Joe's) and I hope that they're able to collect some kind of data that contactless payments are being used to keep them available.
I also agree with the idea of not many people
not using it or bothering to set it up because of the fear of anything contactless. I've heard numerous times that boogeyman is going to come and skim your number or that that it would somehow make a card more likely to be fraudulently used if there's a virtualized one on their device (nevermind swiping at that random gas pump or ATM). I think it was about ten years ago that the early contactless cards started appearing here and didn't take off because of similar fears (granted those were the less-secure RFID ones), but I think the push of various stakeholders in the payment industry to get contactless cards going (a conversion of many cards and uptick in advertising contactless from Chase, Visa, Capital One, American Express, etc.) might help.
Despite many on this thread thinking that Apple Pay requires something special between Apple and the merchant (it doesn't) or that a merchant is charged more for Apple Pay (they aren't and from their end, the card is typically just seen as a Visa/MC/Amex/Discover with a different number and contactless listed as the interface), the motivations tend to be more around merchants wanting you to use their app or their own proprietary payment system, potentially cutting out the credit card networks. Although most Kroger stores (and the various subsidiaries) seem to use Verifone mx915 terminals (same as Meijer and Aldi, and the small version of what Target, Trader Joe's, etc. use) and Walmarts typically use Ingenico isc250s (the smaller version of what Best Buy uses), which have NFC enabled out of the box, they disable it. I think the intent is that if you're going to pay with your phone, you should use their app instead either to encourage pulling from your debit card/checking account or to at least allow data collection.
I think it will continue to be a tug-of-war between the retailers, the payment industry, and consumers. The fortunate thing is that contactless cards, Apple Pay, Android Pay, etc. all use the same technology so it's an all-or-nothing thing. In the past four years or so, I've seen more places supporting it and having employees that are aware of it, so I think the general trend is positive.
