True. Ace is significantly superior, IMO. Friendly and courteous staff, good product selection, sufficient quantities of most items, and prices on par with Home Depot and Lowes.
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Major Retailers that Support NFC Payments
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True. Ace is significantly superior, IMO. Friendly and courteous staff, good product selection, sufficient quantities of most items, and prices on par with Home Depot and Lowes.
See, I was thinking vending machines were a big part of that 90% figure. We'll never truly know for sure, though.
They may still take NFC, however you have to have to do extra work for example walk up with the server to pay, or go inside to pay for gas. Or for gas you can use an App for Apple Pay.
I know. That limits nfc/apple pay usage. If you have to do extra work it defeats the purpose of using contactless and/or Apple Pay and, more often than not, it won’t even be easy to begin with. In my experience, the staff at restaurants in the US is still too unfamiliar with tapping. They won’t easily let you walk up to wherever they process payments, it’s very hard to get american employees to deviate from their usual workflow of just taking the card. Furthermore, if there is a cashier, he/she most likely won’t be open to try tapping -still new to most sit down restaurant cashiers- instead of the usual swiping or inserting.
With regard to using an app I doubt that counts towards the 90%. I believe Apple‘s 90% number basically refers to places that physically accept Apple Pay, i.e., by tapping. Gas stations and restaurants that accept it using an app are too few to make a difference in that percentage. Besides, we are talking about tapping in this thread, and using apple pay via an app or a website is an online payment and does not count as tapping.
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Oh they probably are. Most already have nfc (unlike in Mexico, where almost every single vending machine is still cash only). I agree that We’ll never truly know what exactly apple defines as a retailer, though. Still, I believe Apple’s number is inflated by excluding several business categories that, if included, would make the percentage drop sharply.
On the other hand, if you're using Apple Pay for the security, you're likely okay with that extra effort, too. And potentially steering your own spending towards restaurants, etc. that will actually let you run your own card (which, while uncommon in the US, do exist now).
While the data on my own site isn't fully reliable, either, it seems that 82% of merchant locations that are listed do support it as of this writing. The number of unique retailers is only around 71%, though, likely in large part due to the remaining holdouts (Walmart, Home Depot, USPS, etc.) having a significant number of locations in their own right.
Anyway, FWIW, I can go most days only using contactless. I know that's still not true for everyone, but it's an improvement from even a few years ago.
I was just at Home Depot today and noticed they had upgraded their payment terminal; it's a newer model than the ones they used to have at that store. Though the older model is also one that supports NFC. It's a model I've used Apple Pay on numerous times at other stores.
I took my phone out to pay and put it on the terminal, and the lady said "sorry no Apple Pay". I asked her why since this same model terminal supports it in other stores, and she said it's corporate policy. She has no idea if they'll ever fix it.
So yeah, corporate doesn't give a crap. The employees seem sympathetic about it, but can do nothing. They have the hardware, but refuse to enable the feature. I think we're going to need a mandate from the card processors to see an end to this bull.
I took my phone out to pay and put it on the terminal, and the lady said "sorry no Apple Pay". I asked her why since this same model terminal supports it in other stores, and she said it's corporate policy. She has no idea if they'll ever fix it.
So yeah, corporate doesn't give a crap. The employees seem sympathetic about it, but can do nothing. They have the hardware, but refuse to enable the feature. I think we're going to need a mandate from the card processors to see an end to this bull.
Corporate and international policy, that is. Home Depot stores in Mexico also have new terminals that support NFC and they, too, have it disabled. Canada is the only country where Home Depot and Walmart have NFC enabled. I wonder what happened there to force them to turn it on that hasn’t happened in other countries.
Card network mandate.
I mean, it took a pandemic before the US even started getting significant growth in contactless usage. A mandate was thus likely very hard to justify prior to 2021 or so, if one was even considered. It might even be hard to justify now on the grounds of "nearly every terminal has the hardware, customer demand will eventually force the holdouts to enable it".
OTOH, the networks also misjudged how resistant people in general (not just merchants) were to it, so it's possible that no amount of customer demand would force enablement at some.
So I added Michael's, Wendy's and Fleet Farm gas now has working contactless at the pump. Michael's is still using MX915s and Wendy's upgraded to Lane/3000s. Shouldn't we get rid of the "* Not a featured Apple Pay merchant" since the Apple Pay site no longer lists any merchants anymore.
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I believe Wendy’s installed the Lane 3000s as their first chip/nfc readers, not as an upgrade. Until not long ago, many if not all of their locations were still using the old magnetic stripe reader built in to their cashier’s computer screen.
Wendy's had EMV chip support with iSC250s but they nearing EOL so they replaced them. Took 3-4 months before they enabled contactless after adding the Lane/3000s.
At least one location here is still using iSC250s as of a couple of weeks ago. Might be worth another check to see if that's still the case.
Not all Wendy’s locations. Many of them had those pinpads, but some still only used the magnetic stripe reader on the computer as recently as 2020.
Yeah, I visited one today (but didn't stay) and they were still using the iSC250. That doesn't mean that they don't already have it turned on at the places with upgraded hardware, but I'm not sure what locations around here (if any) have it.
I recently drove cross country, from Texas to Florida, and almost every gat station we stopped at took Apple Pay at the pump. That's not true in my city, so it may be that Apple Pay is being added to stations close to interstates first. Can someone confirm?
Also, last I heard, Apple Pay was not working inside of Wendy's, but only on the app.
Also, I heard that USPS was enabling Apple Pay inside USPS stores, but I haven't seen that yet. Has anyone? I don't go to their stores too often though, so YMMV.
Also, last I heard, Apple Pay was not working inside of Wendy's, but only on the app.
Also, I heard that USPS was enabling Apple Pay inside USPS stores, but I haven't seen that yet. Has anyone? I don't go to their stores too often though, so YMMV.
I haven't spoken to anyone at the counter recently but the kiosks definitely don't have NFC turned on as of within the last month.
I think it depends on the gas station chain more than anything—some like Speedway and Circle K have it on all their pumps, while others like Shell may have readers that aren’t active. There’s the other category where the pumps may not even have the capability yet, but it seems each chain and owner/operator are approaching it differently.
As for Wendy’s it seems that some have it working inside, but others almost seem to be fighting it or not allowing use even if the readers show insert/swipe/tap. it’s totally a YMMV thing at this point.
As for post offices, I haven’t been in lately, but I’ll keep an eye out next time.
I agree about the gas stations. All I can add is that having pumps with built in card readers was a bad decision in terms if upgrading. Obviously when those things were installed nobody realized they’d have to be upgraded some day.
As for Wendy’s, that has always been a difficult place for mobile payments. Not long ago several of its locations were still using the old magnetic stripe reader built in to the computer’s monitor. Besides, the staff isn’t willing to let people pay that way: Samsung Pay with its MST could be used at all Wendy’s locations, but the staff rarely allowed it.
We were at Red Lobster today and the Presto device didn't have contactless enabled. I remember it working last time we were there, albeit quite a while ago. Temporary issue or did Red Lobster fully disable it for some reason? They even had EMV contactless before so if they did purposely disable it, it wouldn't have been due to that.
It wouldn't surprise me if contactless support was a franchisee choice there. That sort of thing isn't unheard of, unfortunately. However, considering that the ones here still don't have the new Lane series terminals, it might just be a slow rollout.
It wouldn't surprise me if contactless support was a franchisee choice there. That sort of thing isn't unheard of, unfortunately. However, considering that the ones here still don't have the new Lane series terminals, it might just be a slow rollout.
This exactly. I see pumps all the time that don't have Apple Pay. Wawa does, 7-Eleven doesn't for example.
Most pumps are modular, so the retrofit to add contactless and EMV chip support can be done at the same time (Speedway did this at a lot of their locations with the NCR OPTIC products—the whole POS portion gets replaced with one unit that does everything, including contactless, loyalty, and the receipt printer). There's also retrofit kits that can replace portions of older pumps with larger color screens and contactless, which is what I saw at some of the Circle K stations in my area (some of those pumps went through a handful of brands over the years...Amoco->BP->Mobil->Circle K).
Wendy's has seemed to be a difficult rollout in general—between the inconsistencies of actual deployment and stories of surly staff, it just seems...odd. Some of the stories almost sound like there's staffs in a vacuum from 2015 that still think any kind of contactless payment is sorcery, while most other places won't bat an eye (or at the very least let you try). The Wendy's by me is awful for other reasons, so I haven't really messed with trying and go elsewhere.
I wonder what will happen as things go along with the purchase of Speedway by 7-Eleven. Considering they have it all working with EMV contactless on the pumps, it wouldn't really make sense to disable it for consistency, but there have been some 7-Eleven things creeping in otherwise (Slurpee and Big Gulp).
Yeah, many of them here are seemingly drive-thru only (staffing shortages?) so I've really only been to one or two to see so far. Figured it'd be much harder to convince an employee at the drive thru to let me try.
I'm honestly not sure what 7-Eleven's doing. Most of their gas pumps around here are still swipe only, for instance. The one or two that I've found with EMV enabled (or at least the hardware for it) don't have contactless readers.
OTOH, the Shell stations owned by Speedway do seem to be getting EMV capable hardware en masse now. It's yet to be turned on but at least they added contactless readers at the same time.
Well it still took a long time. As an example of the contrast, here in Mexico since gas stations are staffed in the pumps area they just provided the staff with wireless POS (the same used by restaurants to process payments at the table) many years ago when they wanted to start accepting cards. Over the years, newer models of the wireless POS came setup and ready for contactless, so the change was almost natural. I’ve been using Apple Pay at my local gas station in Mexico for nearly 6 years while americans waited for theirs to upgrade to contactless on the pumps. Even with apple pay not officially rolled out in Mexico, it was easier to use it at gas stations there than in the US. Likewise at restaurants.