Walmarts and Sams club locations are chosen in part because of land prices. Costcos are not in the fancy part of town either. Big warehouses are rarely in urban areas because of high crime and costly land. I witnessed a Target go bankrupt in an urban area purely from so much ago lifting (had a conversation with the manager about it). The grocery store that replaced them insisted they have a police unit in the store and outside the store 24*7.
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Walmart Still Doesn't Accept Apple Pay in U.S. Despite Many Customer Requests
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As soon as card issuers eliminate the
If you are paying by cash or by using a debit card instead of the Costco Visa credit card (or something with even better rebates) you are doing it wrong bc you are just letting the cash rebates slip away.
If you are access an atm by inserting any physical card you are doing it wrong bc security. (Look up the latest skimmer report on krebsonsecurity dot com.) The Credit Union association hasn’t got its act together re contactless atms like the big banks have so you need to be careful.
Generally if you are using any card to pay without using ApplePay as your firewall you leave yourself open to increased risk.
What we have found is that for anything bought in person that doesn’t need buyers protection coverage, we use the Costco Visa card via our Apple Watch. If it is a big ticket item we use AMEX via the watch.
Almost never use checks and less so cash. In this way we minimize risk, maximize convenience and rewards.
And we avoid Walmart and Kroger like the plague.
I also wonder if there is collusion among Home Depot, Lowe’s and Menards in that none of them take Apple Pay. It’s curious that none of these big players offer it.
This is the kind of wisdom I like. Also “homeless people should just buy houses” and “why don’t poor people just get better jobs”.
Plenty of companies may act like monopolies at times but unless/until they are actually declared a “monopoly” or having “monopoly power” (as determined by local laws/courts), it can be allowed. It doesn't appear Walmart has anything close to a monopoly in this case and therefore it shouldn't raise any anticompetitive/antitrust legal matters.
It's not uncommon for stores, restaurants, etc. to not accept certain credit cards. Some don't even accept credit cards period.
And I thought that was only done in Mexico (inspecting the cart/receipt). And even in Mexico it’s only done at certain stores such as Costco, Sam’s or Home Depot, but not at regulas supermarkets including Walmart.
There was one time I was at Staples and they were going out of their way to try to sell me some rewards thing that I didn't want (not giving my personal info to some company when I have no idea what they're gonna do with it). I was about to pay with Apple Pay, and I kid you not, the salesperson literally looked me in the eyes and said "We only accept Apple Pay if you are a rewards member"
I looked at him for about a solid five seconds, tapped my phone to the terminal, and paid. I've never shopped at Staples since. That store had the most pushy
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This is unfortunately correct. Same story at places like Home Depot and the Kroger group. After the contactless payment wars of about 2014 or so, any company large enough to do it made their own system to keep all the financial benefits and metrics for themselves. Or simply refused to accept contactless payments at all.
Not sure why people are disagreeing. I don’t “like” it either but it’s true.
But that sentence was about Canada. Walmart in the US (and apparently in other countries such as Mexico) seems to be a lot more stubborn, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, even when cornered between enabling NFC or not accepting any cards at all -which could happen due to a card networks mandate or something-, they choose the latter and go cash only.
Doesn’t work with Walmart. Due to its size they can’t ever lose enough customers to make them budge. Not from their refusal to allow contactless at least.
CVS does take Apple Pay now, though. They do since 2018. Unlike Walmart, they finally budged.
After reading this thread, I wonder why the US hasn't enforced anti-monopoly laws. In my rural little town in Scotland, with a population of about 18,000 on a good day, we have 4 supermarkets, 3 large convenience stores, and 8 or so small specialist stores (organic food, local farm produce, butchers, fish mongers, etc.) within town limits. There are another 4-5 supermarkets and another 2 convenience stores within a few minutes drive in neighbouring towns and villages. There is lots of competition and choice among stores. Increasingly in the US the big companies seem to be dominating everything, and it leads to poor service like Walmart's surveillance capitalism system.
I tried Cashi, Walmart Mexico’s equivalent to the US Walmart Pay. It made me miss Apple Pay. The fact that at Walmart stores in Mexico the QR is displayed on the cashier’s computer screen instead of the pinpad like at US stores doesn’t really help.
Apple nor the US Gov't can force Walmart to accept Apple Pay, especially when it's competing against their own payment system. I don't see Apple accepting Walmart Pay.
I thought the same too! My local garage doesn't take card but he likes cash in hand... for whatever reason ha! Very good point, I've seen street performers with those little sumup machines. It's always so strange when you realise America is so very far behind in a lot of areas.
Walmart has its own digital payment method in its app called Walmart pay (that makes you scan a qr code) which can be used to track your offline purchases since it’s tied to your Walmart account. This way they know your purchasing patterns both online and offline.
The card networks can. In fact, that seems to be why Walmart had to enable contactless/apple pay only in Canada and not everywhere else where they have stores. But, even in that case, Walmart US is so stubborn that they might even prefer to stop taking cards and go cash only than turn on contactless.
They are choosing not to use it, it isn't like they are incapable of using it.