I’ve been using this through Ibotta since it released for the cash back. I save all of my cash back throughout the year to buy Christmas gifts at the end of the year. I always end up with $300-$500 for presents.
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Major Retailers that Support NFC Payments
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I’ve been using this through Ibotta since it released for the cash back. I save all of my cash back throughout the year to buy Christmas gifts at the end of the year. I always end up with $300-$500 for presents.
Agreed, but if you didn't want Walmart to have your card # it would be a way around Walmart Pay.
Agreed, but if you didn't want Walmart to have your card # it would be a way around Walmart Pay.
Exactly. I don't want them to be encouraged to have a payment system only for their stores. I want to pay with my watch like I can at so many other retailers.
I wonder if the policy of intentionally holding out of all forms of contactless payment (because actually it's not just Apple Pay they are holding out of) extends or will extend to other countries where Walmart has a presence. Here in Mexico, for example, Walmart has an app similar to what Walmart Pay does in the US called Cashi, but they've never accepted any contactless payment at all at their stores before, so no idea if they are holding out of it intentionally to force people to use Cashi like the US counterpart held out of contactless in favor of Walmart Pay.
In addition, here in Mexico a local bank (BBVA) announced in 2018 that they were working with Walmart to enable contactless payment at all their stores mainly for use with the bank's own app BBVA Wallet (though we know once contactless is turned on it opens the door to all forms of payment that can use it). Nonetheless, nearly two years later there hasn't yet been any visible or noticeable change at Walmart stores in Mexico, nor at any of the other store brands that Walmart owns and operates in Mexico such as Sam's Club, Superama or Bodega Aurrera so no idea if the plan has been aborted and Walmart will intentionally hold out of all contactless payment.
Finally, the best way to discourage Walmart from doing what they are doing is to stop shopping there at all and spread the word to do the same among friends, family, acquaintances, etc. No matter how large Walmart is, they're not the only store of its kind in the US. And let's not be a victim of discount offers. The only language that such a large company will understand is the language of money. Especially if it is an American company.
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Would definitely make it easier to find the NFC Chip. I wish all the readers that took it would put the symbol sticker where the chip is!Why are most readers in the US so huge and bulky?
Most in the UK are similar to this
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Yea last time we went there, they said it didn't work.
The bulky terminals in the US are used mainly for two reasons: first of all, unlike debit cards, which have been chip+pin for years, all US credit cards were chip+signature until 2018 (now they're chip+nothing else) so all retailers that had the bulky POS devices used the big touchscreen for customers to sign to authorize the charge to their card in order to save some paper. Second, those stores also often use the big touchscreen to display advertisements and for the shoppers to complete customer satisfaction surveys.
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They also use the big screen to display advertisements and for the shoppers to fill out customer satisfaction surveys.
I don't know if many people here shop at Meijer, but I'm sort if curious the amount of data and how they've acted on the data from the one-question, 3-choice surveys they do. Since it appears before the receipt starts to print (things processing), it's something people seem to actually do.
None of the Walmart stores I have visited in Canada accept contactless payment. Interestingly enough, contactless payment *is* accepted at their ASDA stores in the United Kingdom. I used it on multiple occasions last summer while in the East Midlands.
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I feel like that question slows down the process, at least at self-checkout. It seemed a little faster before they started doing that... but maybe that's a placebo effect.
Thanks for the info. My comment was more aimed at countries in Hispanic America where Walmart has a presence under that name such as Mexico, though. Countries where contactless payment exists but apple pay itself still isn’t officially available unlike Canada and the UK where it already is long since officially available. I was wondering whether Walmart will hold out of apple pay in those countries if apple pay ever does arrive to any of them (which is becoming more unlikely than ever after nearly six years and still no news about apple pay coming to anywhere in Hispanic America).
Walmart uses the same 4690 based system worldwide. With Ingenico PIN pads worldwide.
yeah, I know. They use Ingenico isc 250 pinpads at all their stores (see picture below). All with NFC turned off. However, that doesn’t mean they will necessarily hold out of contactless payment in other countries because there is a difference between the US and other countries: The merchant exchange group they were members of, which intended to support CurrentC, only existed in the US. Outside the US, Walmart really has no reason to hold out of contactless payment: there was no MCX group or CurrentC in other countries and in most of those countries they don’t have Walmart Pay either (in Hispanic America, Mexico is the only country where they have a similar app called Cashi). Furthermore, one bank in Mexico announced in 2018 that they were working with Walmart and a local chain of convenience stores (Oxxo) to enable support for NFC contactless payment so customers could use the bank’s app to pay with their phones. So no, the fact that Walmart uses the same equipment everywhere doesn’t mean they will hold out of NFC everywhere like they did in the US.
That reminds me of the very first days of Apple Pay - there were some Walmarts that had the iSC250s installed with NFC enabled (typically at new self-checkout stations), and most others still had the older EMV chip/swipe-only Ingenico terminals (6550s maybe?) or Verifone mx860s without the NFC module added. Once the MCX/CurrentC decree was handed down, the iSC250s had NFC disabled and then more started getting rolled out as replacements. Apparently down this thread, a few stores had Verifone mx915s with it accidentally left on out of the box, too: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-pay-works-at-walmart.1806003/
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That’s a very old thread though, from 2014. At that time, MCX merchants were just starting to disable NFC so it still worked at some of their locations. By now, all those holding out of NFC like Walmart have already made sure it doesn’t work on a single pinpad at any of their store locations.
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Yeah, I remember participating in that thread 5-6 years ago, so I had to dig it up for some context: Walmart was using a variety of terminals and it seems that the few NFC-enabled ones were anomalies, but they could enable it in certain markets if they chose. Since then, the iSC250 seems to be what they're using everywhere, and they've made sure to have it disabled across the board.
But yeah, even in markets where NFC is common everywhere, Walmart is the holdout (the one place I had to insert my card on a trip to Canada).
I was told by my wife and someone else they were told there is no more AP at the pump?!? And were told it was more secure to use a physical card??? Goodbye Wawa, hello Sheetz and Exxon if so. At least put a sign over the readers if you don't take AP anymore, and don't make it take like three tries for a chip card to work and tell the pumps to **** that they take chip cards. Very annoying to have like eight pumps repeating that on different intervals. Even if they did still take AP, that in itself would drive me away.
From what I've heard it's temporary because the NFC readers that Wawa use don't support EMV contactless yet, thus they can't be turned on when the chip starts getting used on the insert readers. Supposedly they'll start working again later this year but who knows.
It's exactly this reasoning. Though they probably could have left it MSD Contactless for now.
Considering Wawa got into some major trouble for their recent breach, they probably don't want to risk the possibility of additional sanctions. But yeah, otherwise they probably could have left it enabled in MSD mode; I'm not sure there's been much enforcement of that particular rule of Visa's.
Oh there is enforcement. That’s why jcpenney shut off contactless for a while last year.
Given they also shut off Apple Pay support in their app, it's arguable whether JCPenney disabling it in-store was actually due to Visa's EMV contactless mandate.
BTW, they still used MSD contactless when they got around to re-enabling the latter.
Yeah I always thought disabling apple pay online was stupid if the argument of the emv mandate were true. apple pay online is a different animal.
They probably were attempting to come oot w/ Something stupid like JCP-Pay or something and realized that they don't even have the money for it all, LOL
Seems that's not right. Went to Sheetz, and they also have the chip readers going too, and AP worked fine.