Apple pay has nowhere near 70 or 80 percent acceptance. The US as a whole isn't near that number in any way shape or form.
According to the National Retail Federation mobile contactless payments was only at 58% and that includes the 15% or so bump it got from Covid.
The NRF has also traditionally disliked the card networks and has an interest in making stuff involving them seem a lot less used/supported than it actually is. For instance, it wasn't that long ago that they had yet another press release/article disparaging EMVco and the PCI compliance process more generally.
Anyway, just the other day I updated Dollar General and Tractor Supply Company on
my site as supporting contactless because people have reported the former as supporting it now and I was able to confirm it in person at the latter. This brought merchant adoption figures up to
81.1% of individual locations and 70.9% of retailers.
(Disclaimer: this only tracks the places that actually run the chip on your chip-enabled credit or debit cards. However, we're far enough away from the 2015 liability shift that there really aren't
that many places that only swipe anymore. And of course, since it relies in fair part on user contributions, this isn't an exhaustive resource.)
In addition, if you believe Visa,
84 of the top 100 retailers support contactless payment now. That doesn't sound like contactless is being considered a "fringe" technology to me.
Nobody wanted a pandemic, but that doesn't mean we can't be grateful for the fringe benefits where they exist. Another thing the pandemic has done is advanced mRNA vaccine technology by about 10 years in just one year. This opens up the possibility of (eg) cancer vaccines - it may end up saving many lives in the future!
Oh I know. I'm just not sure increased contactless adoption alone was worth the cost, is all. Perhaps this will ultimately be considered a wakeup call for us to start to work towards a better country overall, so maybe it'll be close to a positive long-term?
The way Europe solved this was to regulate the card interchange fees. Accepting cards became so cheap that it's probably cheaper than the costs of handling cash for many businesses. It's pretty rare to find cash-only businesses now days, unless their machine/internet is broken.
Debit interchange is at least somewhat capped here, but at least 40% of debit cards aren't subject to said cap (IIRC), so there's still incentives for merchants to discourage card use (or force consumer unfriendly measures like PIN prompts when using debit cards with Apple Pay).
Of course, I don't see credit cards and those 40%+ of debit cards being capped any time soon, if ever. And there seems to be enough dislike of the card networks by merchants that I'm not even sure many of the holdouts would suddenly enable contactless even if running it was effectively free for them.
