So Apple Pay went live this past Monday, and because I am apparently the kind of person who reads Tim Cook keynote transcripts for fun, I've spent the last few days actually trying to use the thing in the wild instead of just watching demo videos. Short version: it's kind of great when it works, and this week I learned exactly which stores near me don't want it to work.
Setup was almost annoyingly easy. Added my Chase debit card to Passbook in about ninety seconds, no typing the card number in, just pointed the camera at the card and it read it off the plastic. Held the phone near the reader at the Walgreens on the corner of 9th, double-clicked the home button, felt the little Touch ID tap, and there was the chime and the checkmark. Bought a bag of pretzels and a Gatorade, $4.87, done, receipt printed, whole thing took maybe four seconds longer than swiping a card would have. I've been half-skeptical of NFC payments since the Google Wallet demos back in 2011 that never really went anywhere for most people, so having it just work on the first real try was honestly a little surprising.
Then Wednesday I walked into the CVS by my apartment to grab toothpaste and a birthday card, tried the same thing at checkout, and nothing. No chime, no prompt on the little screen, the cashier just kind of looked at me and said "we don't do the tap thing anymore." Paid with the actual physical card like an animal. Went home and it turns out this isn't a broken-terminal thing, it's on purpose. CVS and Rite Aid are both part of this retailer consortium called MCX that's been building their own payment app, CurrentC, and apparently part of that deal is agreeing not to support Apple Pay or Google Wallet on their terminals even though the hardware is sitting right there capable of doing it. So the readers are physically present, just switched off for this specific purpose.
I have opinions about this and none of them are charitable. CurrentC, from what I've read about it, works by making you open an app and scan a QR code off a screen at the register, which is a payment flow that was already kind of clunky in like 2012 and now feels actively regressive next to holding a phone near a sensor for two seconds. The pitch is apparently that it lets retailers skip the card network fees and pull straight from your checking account, which fine, I get why CVS corporate likes that math. But as the person standing at the register holding pretzels, I do not care about their interchange fee structure, I care that the thing that worked at Walgreens didn't work forty minutes later four blocks away for no reason I could see with my own eyes.
The part that bugs me most is that nobody at CVS could actually tell me why, the cashier clearly didn't know either, she just knew it stopped working sometime this week. That's a bad way to roll something out even if you're the one doing the blocking on purpose. At least tell your own employees what's happening so they're not shrugging at customers who are standing there tapping a phone against a dead reader like an idiot.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend this is a huge tragedy, I have a wallet, I can use a card, the sky isn't falling. But it's a genuinely weird thing to watch play out in real time, this quiet turf war happening at the checkout counter between the phone company and the drugstore, and the customer just gets to be confused in the middle of it holding a birthday card. Apple Pay is currently live at Whole Foods, Walgreens, McDonald's, and a bunch of other big chains, and dead on arrival at CVS and Rite Aid, and there's no indicator on my phone that tells me which one I'm about to walk into until I'm standing at the register finding out the hard way.
I'll probably keep using it where it works because when it works it really is faster than digging out a card. But I've started just defaulting to the physical Visa the second I see the CVS logo, which feels like exactly the opposite of the habit Apple was hoping to build this week.