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Rite Aid and CVS Block Apple Pay and Google Wallet
An anonymous reader writes CVS and Rite Aid have reportedly shut off the NFC-based contactless payment option at point of sale terminals in thousands of stores. The move will make it impossible to pay for products using Apple Pay or Google Wallet. Rite Aid posted at their stores: "Please note that we do not accept Apple Pay at this time. However we are currently working with a group of large retailers to develop a mobile wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015."
CurrentC seems way too involved for most people to ever give a shit about.
A token based system vs. direct access to my personal data and bank account? I'll take Apple Pay, thanks.
Trolling is a art,
To push away the two leading mobile solutions especially when you're in the midst of losing smokers in CVS (a good move health-wise but consequential for sales nonetheless)? Heck they wouldn't even do Passport.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How does this not violate these stores' agreements with Visa (etc), which have explicitly partnered with Apple and Google to provide Pay and Wallet as a valid method of using their (virtual) cards at the register?
And worse than simply not accepting it, they did so because they plan to come up with their own competing product??? WTF, Rite Aid, do you really think people will rush to use yet another crappy store-specific solution, rather than look confused at the cashier for a few seconds before walking away, leaving their stuff at the register?
It appears that CurrentC moves liability exposure almost entirely onto the consumer, whereas Visa limits consumer exposure to $50 that most banks waive in actual fraud. Add full access to your bank account to make the worst-case liability exposure whatever you have in your account, and privacy terms that allow them to use health related data that could have been protected under HIPPA. Tell me again why I would want to use this?
There are a lot of hidden costs associated with using cards and other technologies with payment terminals. When you pay $6.00 for your purchase, the retailer doesn't get all that money.The processing company that processes all the transactions paid for with cards at a retailer gets a cut of every transaction. If it is a credit card, like Visa or MC, then the credit card company also takes a small percentage.
While Google Wallet and Apply Pay may be free to the end-user, I highly doubt that it is free for the retailer. Google and Apple are likely taking another slice of the pie. So... percentage for the processing company, percentage for the credit card company and a percentage for Google or Apple. It's not beyond belief that this could easily exceed 5% of the purchase price, which could be about 10% of the profit margin. That's a huge number, even if it only amounts to $0.30 on a $6.00 purchase.
It's an annoying hassle for CVS customers to have to wait and deal with another mobile payment system, but it easily means millions in savings each year, nationwide.
Why can't the market decide this? Why should this end up in court? We currently have deeply entrenched market dominance by credit card companies. Alternative payment schemes are coming out and attacking that dominance, and that only works if a critical mass of retailers actually stand up to the currently dominant players. If courts intervene, it will lock in the dominance and monopoly profits the credit card companies are extracting. Why do you think that would be a good thing?
Shitty customer service is not a strategy.
A CVS fanboi?
If this isn't a poster child for the 'long tail of the Internet' I don't know what is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apple never stores your credit card. You enter your credit card into the phone, it is sent to the credit card issuer and the credit card issuer sends one time use tokens directly to your phone. Those one time use tokens can only be used by authenticating with your fingerprint.
What magstripe? I live in Europe, where we dropped that nonsense in favour of chip+PIN years ago.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Gruber at DaringFireball nails it:
Apple's great strategic advantages over Google, is that they put their customers (i.e. the people who buy Apple's goods and services) needs over their partners needs to be able to data mine those users.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
So you should feel right at home with NFC+PIN then
First, CurrentC involves scanning TWO QR Codes. Wow. It's almost like we should use a radio to exchange the data. Durr. Second, Target, KMart, and Walmart are involved with this... KMart and Target are idiots; Walmart has an empire, what are they colluding with them? Apple customers are elitist that will go out of their way to use their fancy phones to do anything (ex: boarding passes). Whichever one of these retailers wakes up first and embraces secure technology wins a whole lot of new business.
One hack can compromise the credit cards for MILLIONS of people.
"Hacking your wallet" requires a particular person to target you specifically and physically.
In order to do as much damage as a single credit card breach can, everyone in New York City would have to be the victim of a pickpocket at the same time. The great thing about computing is automation. You can fuck up on a grand scale really quickly and really easily.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
NFC is not for Apple only. It's a multi-vendor standard.
This isn't the sort of thing that "the market" can decide. I expect that it'll end up in court.
Sure it is. Rite Aid & CVS will shortly discover whether or not their customers who use Apple Pay & Google Wallet are more loyal to them than they are to Apple or Google, and make their adjustments accordingly.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
> Yup, multiple credit cards have been able to survive over the long term.
Yes. And multiple credit cards have also died out and been pushed out of the market.
...checks UID of jedediah...
OK gramps, just because your JCB card isn't universally accepted, and Golden Corral no longer takes your Diner's Card is no reason to get worked up over newfangled payment systems...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The market will decide this just fine. By the time CurrentC actually comes to market (likely 12 months late and missing promised features) apple pay will already be deeply engrained and driving traffic to participating retailers. Then, once CurrentC is launched there will be a massive pwnage. Then, the current CurrentC backers will flee, people will get fired, and the system will die. Yes, the market works.
That argument covers Apple Pay as well - I can already pay with contactless technology using both my Visa and MasterCard cards without having to sign up to Google, Apple, PayPal or anyone else, so what do they bring to the table?
I used to use Google Wallet / tap to pay at Rite-aid frequently as there's one across the street from my office. I liked it. The other day when I went in and tried and got a message about Apple pay not being supported, I was pretty confused. I don't use Apple pay. Why disable functionality that was previously working and that customers want to use? Google wallet does not charge merchants at all (http://www.google.com/wallet/business/faq.html). If stores want to set up their own competing wallet apps, that's fine, but disabling something that previously worked and that costs them nothing is really stupid.
Facts have a liberal bias.
I already carry something around in my wallet for paying for things that's convenient, secure, (as long as I don't lose my wallet,) and accepted virtually everywhere I go.
It's called, "cash."
Are there downsides to using "cash" for paying for things? Sure, you have to remember to get it before spending it, and generally you have to earn it before you can use it. On the upside... you have to remember to get it before spending it, reducing frivolous and mindless, impulse-buy spending, and you have to earn it before you can use it, reducing the odds of going into debt.
It also assures me of privacy, (it's way harder to track than credit/debit cards, mobile payment systems, etc.) doesn't cause me to get e-mailed or snail-mailed spam or junk-mail, etc., I don't have to worry that some ass-hat will think my "spending habits" are "irregular" and decide to decline my "cash" payment, or that some jack-booted government thug will decide my spending habits are too similar to someone else' spending habits and that I'm therefor up to no good...
"Cash" is the best mobile-payment system ever created, which is why its catch-phrase has hung around so long... "Cash is king."
But enjoy your magical, hackable "near-field" bullshit, and your "magnetic-stripe" crap. I tried many such things, and have gone back to cash. Accepted pretty much everywhere I ever go, or might go, trace-free, and if you're really worried about cooties... you're much more likely to get sick from inhaling the air than from touching money. Best of luck to you all. I'm going to go hit the ATM. (Since I use a credit union, and not a bank, and I use the network ATM's, I don't pay any fees either.)
Cheers!
Absolutely. NFC was the first thing I turned off. Like the "Internet of Things", NFC is one of those things that for me are solutions without problems.
I've got ninety-nine problems, and one of them ain't that it's too hard to make a purchase in a store.
You are welcome on my lawn.
don't use magnetic stripe, but I'm pretty comfortable with chip and pin. Physical contact is required as well as a (somewhat secure) PIN. and because of the pin, yes I do keep my card. The waiter brings a wireless payment terminal and I keep a receipt.
Except for the fact that when you dispute a transaction on a credit card, the worst thing that happens to you is that your card may be frozen or the line of credit may be reduced by the disputed amount.
When you dispute a check or a debit transaction, your money is gone until the dispute is resolved and the bank may freeze all of your accounts during the investigative process, meaning you may essentially have no access to the money in your checking or savings account for a month or more.
https://www.riteaid.com/custom...
http://www.cvs.com/help/email-...
Here's the message I sent. If you're lazy, feel free to use it:
Disabling Apple Pay and Google Wallet, which were previously accepted is not OK. If you want to come up with your own competing system and give people rewards to use it, that's fine, but don't break existing functionality. Google Wallet just works. Apple and Google's solutions don't cost you any more money than a credit card transaction. Your payment app isn't even available yet and relies on QR codes, which means that when it does launch it will likely be very clunky by comparison.
If you can't come up with a sane response to this, I guess I'll be switching to Walgreens.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Exactly! We need a new set of companies to dominate the market, to create new and exciting security problems, innovative modes of discrimination and exploitation, and new types of excessive charges. So what if it has a clunky interface, requires always on mobile service (and data charges) and probably creates new efficiencies for remote theft?
Theoretically NFC payment systems should allow greater degrees of consumer control, security measures and ease of use, but lets be realistic here: which software company do you believe can actually pull off more than two of the three? Google will be changing shit around every version for no reason other than because they can, the Apple version will be easy to use for one or two use-cases and a complete clusterfuck for the rest and this CurrentC thing will be the complete abomination that it sounds like. Amazon will jump in with some poorly thought out copy-cat version of the Google NFC that only works on Amazon.com, and Microsoft will blunder in late in the game with a solution that's reasonably well engineered and has a slick interface, but no one uses it because no one uses it.
At this point, I imagine that if NFC were the new way of payments, that Google and Apple will end up being the de facto means of utilizing the technology, and we'll all be stuck a little bit deeper in either of their respective tar pits, dependent on them first for communication, then for financial transactions. "My Android was free with a two year contract, sign me right the fuck up for some more sweet, sweet vendor lock in baby!"
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Because when I got my new phone, NFC was turned on by default, which drains the battery and creates a potential security hole.
Most people do not use NFC. I don't think the company from whom I buy a phone should be engaging in social engineering to use something I do not want to use.
Honestly, if the feature was there and turned off unless I wanted it, it wouldn't matter to me. As long as we don't go to a cashless society, it doesn't matter to me. But I do not want Apple to become a bank. I do not want Google to become a bank. They are already so big as to be anti competitive. .
You are welcome on my lawn.
No data travels to or from the card unless I put it in the card reader, or the salesperson does so under my watchful eye.
NFC should be renamed NAG: No Air Gap.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Apparently you are intimidated by complete sentences. There's a cure for that problem: Learn how to do it right. Then people will understand you better, and you'll no longer have to try to hide your ignorance behind "I know what I meant and you're an idiot if you can't read my mind".
Perhaps His Holiness is old enough to have learnt about something called "The Law Of Unintended Consequences". This often seems to crop up in conjunction with the implementation of Solutions Without Problems. You should read up on it sometime.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, I'm saying there should be ONE contactless pay system, not several competing systems. Because if the market decides, you just get the biggest player, not the best system. This was worked out long ago for money, it's not called "legal tender" for nothing; companies aren't free to come up with their own coins and bills. Why should abstractions of coins and bills be any different?
Why would CVS or RiteAid want Apple Pay anyway? If a shopper has bothered to come to the store, select items to buy and then go checkout, chances are they want the items relatively more than someone who hasn't gone to that effort. The stores of course support several different existing methods of payment which work just fine from their perspective. The customer is likely to pay anyway.
Perfect? No. There are middlemen involved in the transaction but it's a system everyone more or less tolerates. Extremely complicated financial deals are behind every card terminal you see in a store. None of that stuff just happens. It's all very carefully planned.
Along comes Apple which puts themselves into play as yet another layer of middlemen, one which the stores have zero control over and one which is outside their established payment process. It also runs counter to their own payment initiative which they have agreed to support exclusively. So what Apple tried to do was an end-run around the established players AND they did it using the existing installed card terminals. NOBODY piggybacks like Apple tried to do without having some major skin in the game. You try stunts like that, you are going to get your hand burned.
So, Apple is at once both another layer of middlemen interference and also potentially a contract issue for the other payment product. Apple was too late to the game. And from the store's perspective again, you have a cart full of stuff, you aren't going to just walk away, you'll probably pay with another method so they have nothing to lose really buy rejecting Apple Pay. Same for GooglePay which I never saw in the wild. Whatever.
Apple has a habit of intruding on entrenched turf and taking on the existing players. They did it with phones. But payment systems are a much more spread out target where everyone has their own idea of what they want and most of them think it works just fine as is, including the customers. Nobody who mattered much was asking for NFC payments. Apple has been pushing this, suddenly, so it's up to Apple to tell everyone why they should want it. It's totally on them. Until they do that, until they make some inroads at the card terminal issuers, Apple Pay is going to be limited.
Sig for hire.