With 7-Eleven buying Speedway, I’m curious to see what happens as a significant number of Speedway stations (at least here in Ohio, their home turf) have NFC at the pump.
Regardless of any deal, they'll need to install
something in the next few months to avoid the upcoming liability shift in April. So far, I haven't seen any movement at any of the 7-Elevens here with gas pumps (other than the one that I know of here that doesn't support contactless inside but
does support EMV outside). Considering that I've heard noises about some sort of pay within an app type deal similar to what ExxonMobil and Shell have, that may be what they're going with at least as a stopgap.
I think it's laziness/avoiding costs in many cases—businesses that have custom systems that already have contact EMV (chip) enabled don't want to make the effort get contactless EMV enabled (many gas stations). There's also flaky custom terminal software (way more of the mx915/925/similar Ingenico units with some sort of merchant-specific software compared with other countries that have simple PIN pads). It worked at Home Depot early on, except with some Mastercards, and rather than fix the issue, Home Depot just turned off contactless.
Many small businesses work just fine with it because they're using a POS solution that has all the interfaces fired up and ready to go.
The other side of things are the large businesses that are pushing something else, like Walmart and Kroger. "Hey, people like paying with their phones, but what if we made them use
our system and we can eventually wean them off credit cards?"
@tmiw can always weigh in on the bigger picture things, too.
That's basically the gist of it. There's also the issue of many simply not liking the card networks enough to do more than the bare minimum (which considering the US market is still pretty much just insert and swipe), though there's not exactly a viable alternative for them at the moment either (other than debit, but many businesses--especially smaller ones--dislike even that).
And honestly, when many have painted themselves into such a corner that they have no choice
but to be certified for up to six EMV contactless kernels (vs. just 1-3* contact kernels depending on if debit and/or UnionPay is also supported), I kinda get why they'd hold out as long as possible. It's why more than a few only bothered when the pandemic made waiting less viable.
* Debit isn't its own kernel per se but there are enough variations over credit EMV in the US that it can require significant effort on its own. UnionPay uses the PBOC standard too, not EMV.
This just reminded me about when I in the late 90s went to 🇺🇸 and was seriously confused how the duck they could allow me to pay by card without requiring a PIN code. That insecure crap seemed dangerous, and ridiculously expensive for businesses as I imagined all the possible fraud/theft.
And 🇺🇸 still refuses to require pin for credit cards. They eliminated signatures in 2018 but did not replace them with PIN or anything else.
Eh, I recently lost one of my physical cards and noticed before someone could use it. It was literally just a ~5min phone call to get it canceled and a new one sent. Best of all, that card updated on my phone while I was still on the call and was usable for NFC until the new one arrived.
That combined with the fact that contactless is now close to being the standard outside the US (if not there already) that I can see why we wouldn't bother with PIN. There's a chance it'd be a much different story had it been a decade earlier and there was no alternative; for instance, I could see PIN being supported far more often on cards, even if only as an "if all else fails" measure for international compatibility rather than something expected to be used domestically.
They do it because they want to get all the information they can about their paying customers for marketing purposes, and Apple Pay and the like prevent them from doing so. Proof of this is the fact that many of those holdout retailers such as Walmart, CVS or Home Depot already accepted NFC contactless payments back in 2014 and purposefully shut off their nfc readers when Apple Pay came out later that year because they didn’t want to accept it. It’s not like they were lazy or avoiding costs: they had already done the work and invested the money but took a step back just to block apple pay. Walmart has gone even further: they recently also blocked Samsung Pay via MST (magnetic stripe) too at all their US stores.
As mentioned before, this likely isn't the biggest reason considering that many of the remaining holdouts have other ways of collecting data (for instance, their own preexisting loyalty programs). Support of NFC also doesn't preclude continuing use of those programs, even if only via barcode/QR or phone number entry.
