When shopping, the natural priorities are:
Method of payment? Who cares? You pay the same amount. You are ready to drive/walk more, pay more for worse product just to be able to pay with Apple Pay so that Apple received their two cents. Your priorities seem rather peculiar. Did anyone tell you that?
I refer to my second post in this thread regarding the concept of distribution. Trust me when I say that you are not paying the same amount for a given product: markup, wholesale, or otherwise.
Distance? Obviously that is situational. One hardly has a choice if they are in the small towns I referred to earlier (population < 6000) and Walmart is the only option in town, versus major cities where Target, Shopko, Fred Meyer, and others are right across the street from Walmart, giving them that choice at comparable (if not cheaper) prices.
I get it, you love NFC. What about WiFi, Bluetooth etc? What are you going to do about your health insurance card? Drug prescriptions card? Costco card? In my grocery store, one can pay with credit card while the cashier is scanning the goods. Wireless payment is accepted only after the scanning is done, so you actually waste some time with Apple Pay.
All of those have the card available in their own respective apps, or have compatibility with the Wallet App. I haven't carried my Costco or Sam's Club card in years; I open up the app, show my membership there, and I'm in. In Costco's case, when I am checking out either with a person or self checkout, the scan the code I show from my app, they ring up everything, and I Apple Pay the purchase. With Sam's Club, I check out everything through their app, and off I go. I use both apps to purchase gas.
My health insurance cards are accessible through their app; however, I will keep a copy of those cards on me for my children, as they are listed as dependents under my policy. My Auto insurance cards are accessible through Wallet.
In general, though, payment method is totally inconsequential to even care about it.
In my 10 years of working in the PCI environment, I can tell you enough how wrong this statement is, especially with how easy it has been to commit credit card fraud based on the payment method alone. Payment method is sure as hell consequential to care about it; but by all means, don't mind when you cross a CC terminal that says "Chip and PIN doesn't work, please swipe", then have your number scraped when the card is swiped.
And yes, that has happened too many times to count.
BL.