Kroger-Owned Grocery Store Chain Harris Teeter Begins Accepting Apple Pay

[Chazak]

When will Walmart, Home Depot and other holding realize they are not trustworthy when it comes to storing payment information or when making a play for your privacy and data by pushing you to install their own app. It is ridiculous, but sadly, most people are not intelligent enough to realize any of this and respond accordingly.

 

[livmatus]

in EU (or at least Czechia / Slovakia) if they accept card payments, they take whichever <brand> Pay you can think of ... Apple, Google, Garmin, whatever

it's not a thing in the US ?

 

[monstermash]

Agreed! Walmart needs it desperately. Not sure what's taking so long for them. Let’s not forget Sam’s club.

Walmart doesn't need it.

If Walmart needed it, it would have it.

Walmart has the money to get pretty much anything it feels it needs.

 

[monstermash]

This is why I absolutely don't understand why the US shun Chip and PIN so badly. It could nearly obliterate fraud except for the idiots *Cough*LJS*Cough* who still don't take the chip. At least give us a choice to enable or disable with some perk for enabling

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't want to have to enter a pin every time I buy something. I mean, screw that.

 

[monstermash]

in EU (or at least Czechia / Slovakia) if they accept card payments, they take whichever <brand> Pay you can think of ... Apple, Google, Garmin, whatever

it's not a thing in the US ?

No.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

in EU (or at least Czechia / Slovakia) if they accept card payments, they take whichever <brand> Pay you can think of ... Apple, Google, Garmin, whatever

it's not a thing in the US ?

If contactless payments work, they take any of them, there's no way to selectively disable it. But quite a few big US retailers have disabled all contactless payments.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Pfffft….you youngsters and your gimmicks. I prefer the tried and true method. It even works during power outages and solar flares:

View attachment 2195056

Would be nice, but most of my cards don't have embossed numbers any more, so those no longer work.

 

[SalisburySam]

I went to the US Post office yesterday.

Needed some stamps.

Paid with watch.

Went to whole foods and picked up a special ketchup.

Paid with watch.

Got a hamburger and fries at chain.

Paid with watch.

so dang useful. I freaking love paying with the watch and apple pay.

So, you bought a burger and fries, added ketchup, then mailed it to someone? Asking for a friend.

 

[CrapShack]

YES! I have two Harris Teeters within walking distance of my house. I have been (politely) complaining to management for years. Just going "boop" with my Apple Watch is a dream come true.

 

[Electroni]

That's because Samsung actually used to send magnetic pulses to the swiper to fake a card swipe at the places that didn't do NFC.

I do not believe these are MST payments. In my experience using MST with a couple different Samsungs, it has a very short range (as in millimeters) and is quite finicky. You have to hold the phone right above the magnetic swipe sensor for it to work. When I use my Samsung Galaxy at Harris Teeter or Kroger I don‘t have to do that. I place the phone above the LCD screen in the same spot where I put the phone when I use GPay to pay in other stores that use the same POS terminals that HT and Kroger use.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

This is why I absolutely don't understand why the US shun Chip and PIN so badly. It could nearly obliterate fraud except for the idiots *Cough*LJS*Cough* who still don't take the chip. At least give us a choice to enable or disable with some perk for enabling

We don't need it.

The reason the rest of the world has to deal with PINs on credit cards is because when retailers there use chip and PIN, all liability for fraud is put on the customer. That's not possible here, it's the one area where we have far better consumer protection laws than the rest of the world. Fraud liability here is ALWAYS on the bank.

And chip and PIN doesn't eliminate fraud at all. It just means that cloning a card also means having to get the PIN, which isn't at all hard to do. You just integrate a camera into your gas pump card skimmer.

So yes, the US shuns chip and PIN, and that's a really good thing. We don't have to deal with the annoyance, and we don't have to care about fraud.

 

[Expos of 1969]

We don't need it.

The reason the rest of the world has to deal with PINs on credit cards is because when retailers there use chip and PIN, all liability for fraud is put on the customer. That's not possible here, it's the one area where we have far better consumer protection laws than the rest of the world. Fraud liability here is ALWAYS on the bank.

And chip and PIN doesn't eliminate fraud at all. It just means that cloning a card also means having to get the PIN, which isn't at all hard to do. You just integrate a camera into your gas pump card skimmer.

So yes, the US shuns chip and PIN, and that's a really good thing. We don't have to deal with the annoyance, and we don't have to care about fraud.

But you do not mind the annoyance and security risk of having a waiter disappear somewhere with your credit card to conduct the payment transaction out of your view when it should be done in seconds at your table with a portable machine?

 

[Slowpc]

Went in twice this morning and self serve worked great with apple pay today. Noticed the tap was in the options on the POS and tapped away with my eggs.

 

[lartola]

This is why I absolutely don't understand why the US shun Chip and PIN so badly. It could nearly obliterate fraud except for the idiots *Cough*LJS*Cough* who still don't take the chip. At least give us a choice to enable or disable with some perk for enabling

Because americans trust their consumer laws do much, they don’t think there’s any benefit to using chip+pin on credit (they do on debit). Same reason why restaurants in the US were never mandated to stop taking away people’s credit cards and start processing the payments at the tables like they were in every single other country in the world.

 

[monstermash]

I dunno why people are so fixated on where a waiter runs the card.

 

[lartola]

I believe that iOS 17.0 will allow third parties to access the NFC functionality of the iPhone without needing Apple Pay. That could open the door for Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, Walmart and even WinCo to accept NFC payments using a specific app not tied to Apple Pay.

But will that happen everywhere? I mean, only in the EU Apple is being required to open up full access to the nfc antenna, so they might as well only do it for that region, just as we now know they plan to do with app sideloading.

 

[lartola]

I dunno why people are so fixated on where a waiter runs the card.

The waiter running away with your card means he has enough time to skim the card or even just write down the information. Though the risk of that happening may be minimal, it’s not zero. That’s why restaurants everywhere but the US were mandated to stop taking cards away decades ago.

 

[lartola]

This launched two weeks ago, as reported by 9to5Mac and confirmed by me out of curiosity same day. Y’all are a bit behind, which is surprising because you’re usually on it.
Kroger had to do this because they are acquiring Albertsons, who already offer Tap to Pay at all their locations, and the removal of which would have upset enough customers to warrant the change. I imagine the very low percentage of daily shoppers using their own in-house Kroger Pay service made it an easy choice frankly.
I for one am glad they finally did this, as not too long ago I was at a Fred Meyer and realized I’d forgotten my wallet at home and had to apologize to the checkout clerk and then drive over to the closest Albertsons because I knew they accepted tap to pay and I could use my watch at checkout. It’s a small luxury but it spoils you to the point it’s absence becomes a real irritant.

The news two weeks ago were only about the Kroger branded stores enabling nfc. It didn’t include the Harris Teeter branded stores at the time.

 

[lartola]

And to to add, they’re also acquiring Safeway, at least here in AZ, who already have ApplePay in place.

They already did. Safeway is part pf Albertson’s group.

 

[lartola]

The companies I mentioned still don't have NFC compliant terminals (for the most part). They'll all switch over to start using NFC terminals, in my opinion, once they can use it for non-contact payments without going through the Apple Pay system.

They do have NFC compliant terminals, they just have the NFC turned off.

 

[lartola]

Some stores do selective acceptance of NFC payments. Harris Teeter has been accepting NFC payments for Samsung Pay for years but have been blocking Apple Pay and Google Pay.

No they don’t. It was Samsung that included in its devices a technology called MST that lets them use the old magnetic stripe reader at places that don’t have NFC such as HT, Walmart, Lowe’s, Home Depot, etc. That’s why Samsung Pay works at those places and other mobile wallets don’t. Walmart managed to block it at its stores in late 2020.

 

[Tagbert]

If contactless payments work, they take any of them, there's no way to selectively disable it. But quite a few big US retailers have disabled all contactless payments.

Oddly, while our QFC grocery stores (Seattle area brand in the Kroger group) have been accepting ApplePay for the last couple of years, they don’t take plain tap-to-pay NFC credit cards. Not sure how or why they set that up.

 

[lartola]

Ok, then Home Depot. When Aple Pay first came out it "just worked" at Home Depot, for a very short amount of time. HD already had NFC terminals. They disabled Apple Pay within weeks.

They disabled contactless and by doing so blocked every payment that would use NFC all the way down to the contactless cards. Only SPay never stopped working at their stores because it could use the magnetic stripe reader.

 

[lartola]

in EU (or at least Czechia / Slovakia) if they accept card payments, they take whichever <brand> Pay you can think of ... Apple, Google, Garmin, whatever

it's not a thing in the US ?

Nope. The US still has places that only allow card payments by inserting the card, no tapping.

 

[lartola]

We don't need it.

The reason the rest of the world has to deal with PINs on credit cards is because when retailers there use chip and PIN, all liability for fraud is put on the customer. That's not possible here, it's the one area where we have far better consumer protection laws than the rest of the world. Fraud liability here is ALWAYS on the bank.

And chip and PIN doesn't eliminate fraud at all. It just means that cloning a card also means having to get the PIN, which isn't at all hard to do. You just integrate a camera into your gas pump card skimmer.

So yes, the US shuns chip and PIN, and that's a really good thing. We don't have to deal with the annoyance, and we don't have to care about fraud.

Not true. In many other countries liability is on the bank too, but chip and pin is still used for added security. The liability shift doesn’t have to exclude the use of chip and pin. Besides, the US already has chip+pin on debit cards, why the reluctance to expand it to credit as well?