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.
As much as it saddens me, I really am beginning to question the future of NFC payments in the US ever becoming ubiquitous, and could unfortunately envision more retailers pulling the plug if <5-10% of their card transactions continue to be contactless.
Without a comprehensive educational effort on the part of retailers to their staff on how to accept and prefer contactless transactions, and to consumers on why they should use it and demand it where unavailable will perpetually hold back any meaningful uptake of the technology.
In the meantime, I’ll keep voting with my wallet and make sure to use Apple Pay wherever I can to help keep those transaction stats alive. All I can say to you all is to do the same, and educate your friends and family.
The US definitely won't reach 100% merchant adoption, at least not without significant changes. For one thing, a lot of the holdouts are the ones who've had grievances against the card networks for quite some time (Kroger with disabling Visa credit card support at some of their brands, Walmart with their infamous "as long as it hurts the card networks" comment re: CurrentC, etc.); as long as interchange continues to be an issue of contention, those will continue to push back.
Additionally, Americans are still mostly okay with having cashiers run cards for them. It's why there hasn't really been a push to support it at restaurants, for instance. In fact, companies like Clover are now coming out with POSes that have chip card slots built in so that merchants won't need to buy PIN pads or contactless readers if they don't want to (though to Clover's credit, they do sell a receipt printer with built-in contactless).
That all said, as of this writing,
nearly 73% of EMV enabled businesses that I know about also support contactless, which is frankly higher than I thought it'd ever end up being. And I do see Apple Pay and similar used at least a few times a week now, whereas I'd go months without seeing it a few years ago. It might simply be a matter of people having unrealistic expectations about its adoption, especially considering how long it took for the US to get EMV in the first place.
There has to be some reason that they specifically want to stop people from using ApplePay. And I think one good hypothesis was proposed, namely, that JC Penny has analyzed their internal data, and people who use ApplePay are less likely to use the JC Penny card (if they have one).
Another possibility is that there's an upcoming Visa requirement around contactless payment that could potentially require JCPenney to develop/certify/release new software. If no one's using NFC already, there's no point in bothering to do that development. Since they can't keep contactless on without satisfying that requirement, it needs to be turned off.
However, that wouldn't explain why it disappeared from the app as well.
Apple Pay isn’t any more expensive to the merchant than paying with a physical card.
Theoretically yes. However, at least in the US, debit cards could end up getting routed over the Visa or MC networks instead of the less expensive debit networks (STAR, PULSE, etc.) if tapped instead of inserted--which depending on the issuer could cost stores significantly more. If most of your customers use debit cards instead of credit cards, I can see that being a hassle.
About two months ago Apple Pay stopped working for me at the local Vons and Albertsons (owner of Vons) grocery stores. I was told that a software update to the terminals broke Apple Pay. After a couple of months waiting for a fix, I finally called Vons and was told that they had removed Apple Pay and there was no schedule for reintroducing it.
From what I understand, it was broken only for MC/AmEx/Discover; Visa still worked. As far as I know, that particular problem should be fixed now.
I am not sure where you live, but the number of merchants in the U.S. that have 400Mb/s connections is tiny (even 100Mb/s is probably rare for most merchants). However, given the amount of
data a credit card generates, no one would be able to tell the difference between a 1Mb/s connection and a 1Gb/s connection (for all speeds, it would be well under a second per transaction).
Whether a store can get even a 1Mb/s connection for anywhere approaching a reasonable cost (or at all), on the other hand, is unfortunately not a given in the US. I remember reading something a few years back about how something like 50% of merchants in the US were still using dialup (though I don't think it went into details as to why).
Anyway, I kinda feel like terminals and cards in the US should have been made offline preferring when we moved to chip--even if only for small transactions--since we're the country with the expensive, relatively slower network connectivity now. However, I'm not sure how people would feel about not being able to see transactions in online banking or not having an up to date available balance for potentially days after using a particular card.