I was shopping today and I was surprised at the number of locations that I went to that supported Apple Pay (aka NFC payments). Along those lines until this week I hadn’t seen anyone asking me to use the chip in my card (EMV chip) eve thought the deadline that shifts the liability to the merchant and not the credit card companies if they don’t use the chip passed in November.
Of all the places I went to today the quick scorecard I had was as follows:
- Macy’s, YES but I knew that already since I have used it before
- Lego Store, NO however what was frustrating about this merchant was that they used the same terminal as several places I have shopped at that do take NFC payments. To make things more annoying the terminal had a big NFC logo on its screen however I was told the system didn’t accept the payment type. I did have to pay using the EMV chip.
- Applebee’s, YES however I couldn’t get it to work. They still get props for the fact that check out was via a tablet at my table. It was still a regular swipe card but cool that I could have ordered food and checked out at the table.
- La Maison Du Chocolat, YES
- Card store, NO. Let’s face it this is a local Hallmark store that doesn’t even take AMEX so I didn’t expect anything. They still used the standard swipe card.
- Party store, NO, however I only bought something very cheap and paid cash.
- liquor store, NO but at least they took AMEX. For some reason I find many liquor stores that don’t take it however that is a different conversation/blog post.
Based on my experiences today counting the stores that should have worked with the NFC payments I was supposed that almost 40% of the stores supported the NFC payments. That was higher than I would have guessed. I am hopeful that 2016 will see a large increase in the number of stores accepting the chip technology.