So this happened to me on Saturday. I'm standing in line at the Rite Aid on the corner by my apartment, buying basically nothing, a bag of pretzels and some allergy pills, and I go to pay with my phone like I have every single time since I got the 6 three weeks ago. Nothing. The terminal doesn't even wake up. The cashier, who is clearly the fortieth person to deal with this that day, just says "oh yeah, we turned that off" like she's telling me they're out of the good coffee creamer.
Turns out it wasn't just my Rite Aid. CVS did the same thing to their registers around the same time, and from what I've read it's not a glitch, it's on purpose. Both chains are part of this consortium called MCX — Merchant Customer Exchange — a bunch of big retailers (Walmart's in it, Target, Best Buy, a bunch of gas station chains) who are building their own payment app called CurrentC. And apparently part of the deal they signed locks them into using CurrentC exclusively, which means the NFC readers that already sit right there on the counter, the ones that would happily take Apple Pay or Google Wallet, have to get switched off so nobody's tempted to use the free option instead.
I get why retailers hate paying Visa and Mastercard their swipe fees. I really do. That's a legitimate business complaint and I'm not going to pretend a few percent per transaction doesn't add up when you're CVS. But the way they're going about fixing it is just user-hostile in a way that's almost funny. CurrentC isn't even out yet. It's not in the App Store. So for weeks now you've had working, fast, secure payment terminals sitting there, and a store has chosen to make them not work, on the promise that eventually there will be a worse replacement. You scan a QR code with it. A QR code! In 2014! It links straight to your checking account instead of going through a card network, which is presumably the whole point for them, but it also means there's no card issuer sitting between you and fraud the way there is with Apple Pay, where your actual card number never even touches the merchant. And I've read (this got reported Wednesday, so it's fresh) that the pilot program's test emails already got grabbed by someone poking around in their systems. Not exactly a confidence builder for a service whose entire pitch is "trust us with your bank account."
Apple Pay itself I actually like a lot, for what it's worth, and I know that's not exactly a hot take three weeks after launch, every tech blog on earth has already told you how the double-click-and-glance thing works. I'm not going to redo that post. What I will say is the experience of using it at a store that supports it (my Walgreens two blocks the other direction still takes it, weirdly, or at least it did as of Thursday) is genuinely nicer than digging out a wallet, and now that I've had it work smoothly a dozen times, having it just refuse at the register feels worse than it would have a month ago. You get spoiled fast.
The annoying part is I don't actually have a side to be righteous about here. Retailers are allowed to decide how they get paid, obviously, that's their business and their equipment. But there's something a little bit insulting about disabling a thing that works in favor of a thing that doesn't exist yet, and not really telling anybody why until customers start asking cashiers who clearly weren't given a real explanation either. My Rite Aid cashier didn't know what MCX was. She just knew she'd been told to say "we don't accept that" and shrug.
Anyway. I paid with the actual physical card like an animal, and on the walk home I made a mental note to just go to Walgreens next time, which is probably exactly the wrong lesson for CVS to be teaching people two blocks from a competitor. If the goal was ever to keep me in the store, disabling my preferred way of giving them money was a strange way to do it.