It has more to do with making Walmart Pay the only contactless option to drive adoption of their mobile app.

I confess that I don't understand what the big deal is. It takes 5 seconds to slide the card into the machine. Personally, I find fumbling with my phone takes longer as does figuring out where the reader wants to tap the card if I'm not familiar with that particular store's system.

> Personally, I find fumbling with my phone takes longer as does figuring out where the reader wants to tap the card if I'm not familiar with that particular store's system.

Aren't both of these just symptoms of unfamiliarity with the tech?

I resisted phone payments for a while, until one day I forgot my wallet and quickly added a few cards to my phone. Now I'm severely tempted to use it more often—my phone has a wallet button on the lock screen that jumps me straight there ready to pay with my default card. I've definitely experienced some friction the two times I've used it, but it seems pretty clear that that friction is temporary while I'm still becoming familiar with it.

The difference is the tap to pay location is usually not obvious, and FaceID will fail sometimes.

One of many reasons why I still have a TouchID iOS device, and am praying Apple will continue to make them.

I'd still have one too, but certain circumstances forced me to get something else. The home button iPhones are better.

Even then, I can tap with the card, which tends to register faster than inserting too. No garbage proprietary software required to be installed on my phone, and I still get contactless.

> It takes 5 seconds to slide the card into the machine.

It sure does, and then 45 seconds while the machine ... thinks about life, and then 15 seconds for it to say "chip read error, reinsert card" and then another 45 seconds for it to reconsider the nature of reality, and then listening to a fire alarm sound that they chose for the success alarm. Excellent UX, no notes

The best is how they flash different phrasings and formattings of "do not remove card" just to make sure you're paying attention. I used to slide the card until recently when it became disallowed, that was a way better UX.

I often leave the house without even my wallet these days. With my phone being my car key and my wallet and my transit pass, there's little reason to carry anything else.

I use it on my watch. Double click the side button even when my watch is under a jacket and just hold it in the vicinity of the reader. It’s very easy once you get used to it.

Same, and I note that the OVERWHELMING majority of other customers that I see at the grocery store or Target are still inserting plastic credit cards into the readers (I do think swiping is going extinct though, as the readers push you to insert instead).

However, this is HN and not at all typical of the U.S. or world overall. Even though we frequently lose sight of that.

> I don't understand what the big deal is. It takes 5 seconds to slide the card into the machine

For most people, there's the time to get their wallet or equivalent out of pockets or purses, fiddle to get the card, put it the correct way and swipe (but not too fast or too slow!). Vs a phone/watch tap which is usually much more convenient.

I guess it's what you're used to. I have a small wallet I carry in a front pocket, haven't had to swipe a card in ages, and it takes 5 seconds to insert the card.

Maybe if I wore my Apple Watch more, I'd get used to using it but the card just seems more straightforward in general. Maybe I'll insert and maybe I'll tap. I'm pretty indifferent.

It would take me just as long to get my phone out of my pocket as it would to get my wallet out. Plus a lot of machines have tap pay now if your card supports it.

But you then have to open your wallet, and slide the card out. With the phone, if it's out, it's unlocked and ready to be tapped.

It's not unlocked until you unlock it. The only reason the phone is more convenient for some people is because they're playing on it while waiting in line.

I realized while waiting in line why Apple Pay makes sense to some people but not me: They're all on their phones in line, I'm not. So for them, it's a cc in pocket vs a phone already in hand.

It means you've got to take the card with you.

Some of it may be that if I'm in a store, I've almost certainly driven there so I probably have my (small) wallet with me.

I use Walmart pay with their app. But then again we’ve totally given up buying off Amazon and do grocery pickup or delivery from Walmart. For 90% of items this is faster than we’d get it from Amazon.

How often do you find yourself somewhere with your phone but not your wallet?

I think this is very region specific. I'm in the UK and hardly ever take my wallet with me unless I'm going somewhere that I know to be cash only and might need to find a cash machine. Only other time I do take my wallet is when I'm in Germany where most places seem to dislike cards.

I always have my phone in my pocket. My billfold is stored in my car, and I do occasionally forget to put it in my pocket when going in to a store. Plus my billfold is thicker than my phone so it's less fun to store in a pocket.

I like contactless just because for some reason, my cards always get beat up and the chips become problematic on my cards after about a year. They just sit in my wallet. But half the time I go to pay with my card, I have to dip twice because the first time, the chip reader always says it is unable to read the chip.

I've also had issues at Walmart where I know some lanes to flat out avoid because the chip readers will always reject my card for unable to read the chip. With my phone, this isn't an issue. Even if I get a new card, wait 8-12 months and its the same problem again.

You can do contactless on your card.

If your bank issues you a card with it. I got a new card about 6 months ago, doesn't support contactless.

But I am aware that the cards exist and I am not opposed to it. With contactless I am fine with it being on my phone or card. But I gotta have a card that has contactless to be able to use it.

are cards that dont have paywave or whatever really that common in the US? my bank cards have both had it

I think most banks, but some banks are still slow to roll out. Also, having a contactless card right now wouldn't help my problem at the local Walmart. They have a bunch of old Ingenico devices that don't support tap to pay anyways. So even if my currently troublesome card had tap to pay, it wouldn't do me any good at my local Walmart. Otherwise, I'd just use Apple pay. Most card readers that support tap on a card also support Apple pay and Google Pay and all the other NFC pays (I think Samsung has their own?).

Also at my current job, I am the WorldPay guy. I work at a point of sale company and my area of ownership is integration into World Pay for payment processing at brick and mortar stores. None of our clients have tap to pay devices. They are all running 15 year old Ingenicos and plan to run them till they stop working. So as of right now, that is at least 2,500 stores in the US that I know of that don't support any kind of contactless payments.

Most of my cards don't have it currently. Some do. I saw the new version of one bank's cards with it so I think when those expires or gets replaced it'll have contactless. Then it'll be about half of my cards without it.

I'm in the US and I'm pretty sure all 5 (6? IDR) of my credit cards have supported tap-to-pay for a couple years now.

I have over 10 cards, debit and credit, and I think only one or two don't support it.

Presumably they do not because they want to track you via your credit card number, and permitting Apple Pay (maybe others too) would hinder that.

It's more that they want to try and convince people to pay with Walmart's own lower-cost (to them) app if you want to do contactless payments from your phone. If they made it easier to use Apple Pay, why would anyone ever use their app?

Why would paying with the Walmart app be lower cost to Walmart? Both the Walmart app and Apple Pay are essentially, as far as payments go, just digital wallets that you can store credit card information in.

When you use them it is still a charge to one of those credit cards.

It might actually cost Walmart more in my case, because the card I have on file has larger rewards for online purchases than it does for in-store purchases, and the Walmart app processes purchases as online even when made in-store. If I pay with the physical card it is processed as in-store.

Apple Pay is just as traceable if they want it to be.

They’re just stubborn and want people to use their option (and card, if possible).

As it is you can load any credit card into the Walmart app and pay by pointing the “check price” barcode camera at the screen.

> Apple Pay is just as traceable if they want it to be.

[Citation Needed].

On the other hand, stores like that probably already do facial recognition on customers, so it really is just intransigence to not allow contactless payments.

See https://birchtree.me/blog/digital-wallets-and-the-only-apple... - the DPAN stays the same at a particular merchant, so Walmart sees all but can't necessarily directly "know" what you're buying at other stores.

Apple Pay and Google Pay have their own virtual numbers, rather than using your regular card number, but the number doesn't rotate.

For example, our local bus company can quite happily offer capped daily and weekly fares when folk use the same device to pay.

Your local bus company isn't trying to correlate your activity across multiple retailers to try to squeeze an extra few cents of value from you, though.

The device account number does not rotate with every transaction. You have to unlink your device from your credit account and re-enroll to do that.

I presume the same.

I always rate my experience 1 star when checking out at Walmart because of this. Probably won't change anything, but I feel I can't just stop going to Walmart because then Amazon is the only place left. Which is also fucked up but let's stay on topic.