Quick one tonight because Im still a little annoyed about this.
Tuesday evening, maybe 6:40ish, I stopped into the CVS on the corner to grab a roll of Tums ($3.79, heartburn is a lifestyle now apparently) and figured Id try out Apple Pay again since it had worked so well at Walgreens on Monday and at Panera over the weekend. Tap the phone, Touch ID, done, no card out of the wallet, felt genuinely futuristic for about four seconds. So I hold my iPhone 6 up to the reader at CVS and... nothing. Cashier just looks at me and goes "we dont do that here." I said the terminal literally has the little wave symbol on it. She shrugged. Not her problem, fair enough.
I figured maybe their reader was just old or broken, but no. Turns out CVS actually pulled their NFC terminals out of service on purpose, on purpose, specifically to block Apple Pay (and Google Wallet, which has existed for years and nobody blocked it before now, weirdly). Rite Aid did the same thing two blocks down, my roommate tried there Wednesday and got the same shrug. So I got back in the car and drove to the Walgreens instead, which is objectively insane behavior for a pack of antacids but here we are.
The reason, as far as I can tell from digging around, is something called CurrentC. Its a mobile payment app being built by a group of retailers calling themselves MCX, Merchant Customer Exchange, and it includes CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Best Buy, Sears, a bunch of others. Instead of tapping your phone, CurrentC has you open the app and scan a QR code on the register, and it pulls money straight out of your checking account instead of going through a card network. The pitch is lower fees for merchants, obviously, since Visa and Mastercard take a cut on every swipe and this cuts them out entirely.
I get why retailers want that. I really do. Interchange fees are a legitimate cost and I dont blame anyone for wanting to avoid handing 2-3% to a card network on every transaction. But the user experience they're offering instead is objectively worse, and apparently these merchants signed contracts with MCX that bar them from accepting other contactless payment methods while CurrentC is being rolled out, which is why a terminal that clearly still has the tap-to-pay hardware sitting right there is switched off. Youre choosing to make your checkout line slower and more annoying for people who already have a solution in their pocket, in order to push an app that, from what Ive read, isnt even out yet and wont be for months.
Small tangent but CVS receipts deserve their own complaint entirely, separate from any of this. I bought one item and the receipt was like eleven inches of coupons for products I will never buy. That has nothing to do with Apple Pay, Im just saying it while Im already annoyed at that store.
Anyway. Apple Pay itself, when it works, is genuinely nice. Its fast, it doesnt show the cashier your card number, and Touch ID means nobody's stealing your thumbprint off a receipt. I used it at the Panera near the office on Saturday buying a bagel and it took less time than digging out my wallet would have. The tech isnt the problem here. The problem is a handful of big retailers decided their own competing app matters more than letting a checkout go smoothly, and are willing to make the customer experience worse in the meantime to protect that bet. Feels like a fight thats going to drag on into next year at least, and I dont love that Im caught in the middle of it over a roll of Tums.