The Home Depot and H-E-B Finally Rolling Out Apple Pay in Stores

Time for Walmart to realize no one wants to scan a screen

Finally! I'm not sure why it took so long.

It blows my mind that Americans don't have tap everywhere. I hear stories of swipe and sign still existing and it really is astonishing.

Home Depot's delay of NFC feels more about having a contract with a hardware and/or software suppliers that don't support tap-to-pay. Not concisely forbidding the method, but picked a vendor that wasn't supporting it.

^ this is correct

About 10-ish years ago, US payment terminals didn't even accept those little insertion chips, we were still using magnetic stripes like savages.

Getting chip readers rolled out required every merchant in America to upgrade their hardware, as well as every bank to issue new cards. Banks didn't want to issue more expensive cards for readers that didn't exist, and merchants didn't want to roll out readers for cards that nobody had.

Congress did something really clever (for once). They passed a law that basically said, "in the case of a fraud dispute, if there is an imbalance in technology (say, a user with a chip card, but the merchant doesn't read them; or a chip-less card from a lazy bank, and a merchant with a modern reader), then whomever had the inferior tech automatically loses.” This motivated the banks *and* the merchants to update all their gear overnight.

"What does that have to do with tap-to-pay and Apple Pay" When this enormous rollout of new terminals happened, because we were sort of "leapfrogging" technology, most of these terminals included tap-to-pay hardware, even though the new cards being rolled out didn't support it, because this hardware was coming from providers who had been selling to Europe for ages. Tap-to-pay gradually got enabled as banks figured out that people were prone to spending more with tappy-cards, and also there was that scare during COVID of physical touch in public.

However, a very small handful of merchants — really stupid and cheap ones, by which I mean Home Depot and Walmart — got the cheapest chip-reading machines possible, which didn't include tappy abilities. Additionally there's a whole thing about Walmart trying to kick off a proprietary QR-code reading standard.

So anyway, it looks like Home Depot has finally decided to roll out new terminals again, probably costing them more money than if they had paid just a little more for tap-enabled terminals back in 2014-ish or whenever.

Is calling this 'Apple Pay' the right terminology? This is just tap to pay, no? Just one is using the NFC in a device (Watch or phone of any vendor), instead of on card, and then it works.

Is calling this 'Apple Pay' the right terminology? This is just tap to pay, no? Just one is using the NFC in a device (Watch or phone of any vendor), instead of on card, and then it works.

Sure, but you're on an Apple blog, so of course we'll focus on Apple Pay.