Not in the US. I've made $10k+ credit card payments via Apple Pay.
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The Home Depot and H-E-B Finally Rolling Out Apple Pay in Stores
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I’m sorry to be that guy, but… that sentence doesn’t make sense.
Is Walmart now the only major retailer in the U.S. that still does not accept Apple Pay?
(No other major retailers — Walmart is now the only one.)
or
Does Walmart continue to be one of the only major retailers in the U.S. that still does not accept Apple Pay?
(There are major retailers that still do not accept Apple Pay. Walmart continues to be one such example.)
Unless it’s a mom and pop joint, I don’t think the person taking your payment at the counter is the one calling the shots on whether they get a chip reader or tap to pay.
The reason Walmart is resistant to contactless payments is they want to be able to profile their customers. By using their own app they get all the info on people and they often save on processing fees when people pay via linked bank accounts or debit.
I'd love for them to either decide to or be forced to take contactless but I won't hold my breath.
I'd love for them to either decide to or be forced to take contactless but I won't hold my breath.
As another Dane 🇩🇰, it’s strange to hear that that there are still many places that doesn’t accept Apple Pay or Google pay.
Where in Berlin last summer, went for my usual run in the morning, and wanted to bring some croissants 🥐 home to my wife at our hotel. Only brought my Apple Watch ⌚️, but the only accepted cash 💰
Germany is very odd that way. They seem to hate or fear credit, home mortgages and not using cash. Perhaps one of our German friends could enlighten us as to why this is the case.
I know what you mean but Wal-Mart is by far the best game in town. They do over 500B in sales, Amazon is about half that. I avoid them too and best can mean many different things but they avoid it because they want people to use forms of payment that dont cost them 2.5%. At 400B, let's assume this much in credit card payments, their fees are like 10B a year. If people pay with cash or their checking account through the app they created, it's a savings since those forms of payment are free of the fees. I wish they took Apple Pay but I also get it where they are coming from financially.
I remember Home Depot was one of the first purchases I made when Apple Pay was introduced. I also remember when they removed the capability from their stores. Good stuff.
Whats more astonishing is that you still hand your card to someone, who walks away, swipes it, and brings it back to you with a paper slip. I'd prefer them to have the table side devices or the ability to scan the receipt and pay.
The USA is very slow and resistant to change. We are still using the imperial system (miles,gallons,feet,pounds), and we committed to converting to the Metric system in the 1980's yet here we are.
I use it at my Lowes all the time. They have supported it at mine since at least last year sometime.
It's not really resistant to change. We focus on companies bottom line. We don't care about people, or their quality of life, we focus on making sure we don't cost the company or their stock holders an extra penny.
For years it didn't matter how insecure the 'swipe' option was, we wouldn't dream of making a company spend extra pennies to prevent users from getting scammed. Everything in the US is about what's best for the companies, not people.
It really is... having been overseas and used tap to pay EVERYWHERE... and then to come back to the states, and there are still locations that I have to insert my card, put my pin in, acknowledge 3 or 6 ads or donation requests (only a slight exaggeration, slight, looking at you PetSmart), then add a tip on for me doing a self-checkout purchase...
Where as... tap and go! Yes that easy. Glad to see Home Depot finally has it, Lowes has had it for a few months now, same with Target. Walmart... thankfully we only shop there on occasion.
Tap to pay is pretty common these days, though certain large organizations have held out. Swipe-and-sign is pretty rare, most terminals require a chip card rather than swiping a magstrip.
See above. It's pretty common but for certain holdouts. Walmart being once, largely since they wanted to use their own competing service.
Initially ApplePay did work at HomeDepot - I remember using it early on at my local store until they turned off the NFC capability.
Walmart terminals do use chip readers, so there's not really a fraud liability difference with tap vs chip like their is with magstrip
This whole Apple Pay thing is just as confusing as Apple TV (hardware), Apple TV (app), & Apple TV+ (service).
There's Apple Pay (NFC/contactless transactions) and Apple Pay (in-app/web transactions). The first one (along with Google Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.) should be dropped and just be called NFC payments or contactless payments instead. As long as a terminal supports NFC/contactless payments, it should automatically support paying with your phone.
Home Depot and H-E-B aren't particularly doing anything special here...they're just finally accepting NFC/contactless payments. It has nothing to do with Apple or Apple Pay itself.
There's Apple Pay (NFC/contactless transactions) and Apple Pay (in-app/web transactions). The first one (along with Google Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.) should be dropped and just be called NFC payments or contactless payments instead. As long as a terminal supports NFC/contactless payments, it should automatically support paying with your phone.
Home Depot and H-E-B aren't particularly doing anything special here...they're just finally accepting NFC/contactless payments. It has nothing to do with Apple or Apple Pay itself.
Ah, but if only it were that simple. One of my sons has Celiac disease, which means that he can't afford to have his gluten-free pizza cross contaminated with the normal wheat-based pizzas. This pizza joint happens to be the only one I know of which encloses their GF pizza in its own sealed container, preventing potential cross contamination issues. Thus, even though I don't personally care for their pizza, we frequently end up ordering from there.
It's not, and you're probably right -- but in the event that the cashier happens to talk to their manager or a manager happens to be running the register, the message will have been sent at least that far, and that's likely about as far as I can ever hope to go, myself. As I see it, from there, it's that manager's responsibility to push it further up their management chain for action.
And as others have pointed out, retail terminals without chip readers have been effectively obsolete for years; the EMV compliance regulations came into effect everyplace except for gas stations in October 2015 -- and the deadline for gas stations was October 2020. Any retail operation that is still using card swipes (or worse, typing the card number into their terminal!) is automatically accepting liability for any fraud that takes place during those transactions.
I'm no financial mogul or anything... but that just doesn't seem like a very wise choice to me.
I don’t understand how this works in America
In Canada if you can tap to pay then you can use Apple Pay, it doesn’t matter what you are tapping
Do retailers in America block specific payment methods on the debit machine itself?
Or do they not accept contactless payment at all?
In Canada if you can tap to pay then you can use Apple Pay, it doesn’t matter what you are tapping
Do retailers in America block specific payment methods on the debit machine itself?
Or do they not accept contactless payment at all?
In the end, both Home Depot and H-E-B are now accepting mobile payments/tap to pay for one reason: security. Why? Because there are still security issues with "chipped" credit cards, even though that was reasonably safe way back in 2014 when Target switched to using "chipped" card readers due to a major data hack in 2013 that resulted in millions of credit cards being canceled. Apple Pay/Google Wallet and tap-to-pay actually use a special one-time use code that is essentially nearly impossible to hack.
This particular discussion is largely about retailers who chose to entirely disable contactless payments on point-of-sale terminals which otherwise supported them. Some of those retailers did so for financial reasons, whereas others (supposedly) did so due to technological issues.
Here is an article which provides a bit of historical context:
The very first sentence of the story says "Apple Pay and other tap-to-pay payment methods."
You're taking the fact that I put a singular focus on Apple Pay in the headline — to be succinct and more topical for an Apple-focused blog — way too seriously. 😂
So the story is actually just about contactless payment generally and not actually about Apple Pay?
Essentially, it comes down to one thing: Walmart and Home Depot wanted the ability to track user purchases for various reasons, something that cannot be done with Apple Pay/Google Wallet and much harder to do with tap to pay.
I still think Walmart will eventually allow tap to pay credit/debit cards, but will set it up so you cannot use Apple Pay/Google Wallet.