Walmart Pay
news.walmart.com
news.walmart.com
One of PayPal's initial strategies was to maximize transactions for which both the payer and payee were PayPal customers. This decreased PayPal's operating costs and reduced fraud by a large amount. Sounds like everyone wins, right?
That's simply not what currency is. Currency is an transferable i.o.u. worth whatever the creditor says it's worth. The most pervasive currency is currently the greenback. Every additional party or layer between you and the U.S. government increases credit risk and transaction costs everytime you make a transaction outside the pay network your currency is held in.
Visa is so convenient because they try to be everywhere, because that's their business. Apple is not a payment network. Walmart is not a payment network. Walmart Pay is simple one part of Walmart's portfolio. Since it's not their core product, they will by necessity make compromises that negatively affect their Walmart Pay from time to time in order to benefit some other part of their business. Look to GE Capital for a case study of what can go wrong there.
Just as Facebook is a walled garden for communities, these pay networks are walled gardens for currencies. Some are actually really great, just as Facebook is actually a really great community site. But at the end of the day it's not your garden. With other options such as Visa or cash, I find it difficult to justify turning over yet another critical apect of my daily life to a profit driven corporation according to the limiting and onerous terms and conditions they set.
Phew. Now I can go back to watching Wes Craven's "Shocker".
Double-tap watch or iPhone button, wave device near register, done. Fast.
That vs Walmart Pay tap iPhone button, [swipe to find icon,] tap icon, wait for app, tap scan button, position camera for QR code, wait for focus & recognize, done. Too long.
I tried Walmart's Scan-and-Go app. Idea was you could scan all your stuff before reaching the register, scan one QR code, pay, and leave. Took an inordinately long time. Walmart dumped it.
Edit: actually there has been a "tap to pay" available at many places. All too often it was turned off, and mildly confusing which cards had it (I had one that did, then its replacement card didn't, so there I was waving a non-tap card at a tap reader). The whole tech fizzled.
Having it as part of your cell phone makes it much more secure (Apple Pay requires your fingerprint for it to work).
Contactless cards can get skimmed:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jul/23/contactless-car...
http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/why-a-disembodied-finger-...
By the time you defeat TouchID, the device will be useless anyway. It's more than secure enough.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/chaos-computer-club-hac...
Argh. I had the same thing happen. Just after getting used to using the tap-to-pay card, my bank replaced it with a "dumb" card and I was back to swiping it.
So instead of 1% of all mobile purchases going to Apple, it goes to walmart instead. With the scale of business Walmart had that can be upwards of a billion dollars a year.
I've used this regularly for the past few months and had no real issues with it.
In addition to the minor surcharge, there is the (opportunity) cost of Apple's hardware, the costs to vendors of supporting (yet) another platform, the consumer provides value to Apple in the form of consumer information, the consumer now has their fingerprint tied to payments, and then there is everything that goes along with the terms and conditions. Regarding the security, I'm not sure what the details are, but it seems that the attack surface is increased substantially. I'd personally prefer to have Visa, AmEx, etc reviewing and resolving fraud and other claims, seeing as how they've been doing it for decades and their bottom line depends on it, whereas Apple is relatively new to the game and Apple's bottom line does not depend on it.
Apple Pay might be awesome. Idk. But it's not "just a nice frontend for Visa, AmEx, etc., with better security".
I may have made an incorrect assumption regarding claims handling, though I'm not sure how that translates me to being "very misinformed".
I wasn't speaking only from the vendor perspective (idk what it looks like to them) or the Apple Pay customer's perspective (I'm not one of their customers) but I highly doubt it's worth my time to research to confirm that adding Apple Pay into the mix does not somehow increase the attack surface or how it does not somehow increase the amount of my personal information that is with Apple.
I personally think this can rightly be described as "very misinformed."
Yes, there is. NFC enabled terminals may be the norm at major chain stores but they do not have widespread adoption in smaller retail outlets.
The merchant pays for those terminals and they are not inexpensive. Sometimes $1000 or more. That tradeoff (making it slightly easier for you to pay) just isn't worth it to most merchants right now. As EMV adoption grows and merchants have to update their terminals to support that as well, NFC will grow.
Also, it may seem as if ApplePay is more secure for the banks as it prevents issues with data breaches but to date, it has not prevented any, will continue to only lessen the impact and is absolutely wrought with card fraud as there isn't any validation that you own the card you are loading into ApplePay. Once it's loaded it isn't checked by the merchant (if the merchant even pays attention these days) and is implicitly trusted by the network.
It's possible there's pressure/support from Visa and MasterCard for small, local retailers to accept contactless payments. It's part of their advertising that you can buy a newspaper using the system, and most newsagents are local, independent shops.
A basic chip+pin (not contactless) terminal is available for £100 (or £3/month), I can't find a price for a contactless one.
I don't understand your security point at all. It hasn't prevented any breaches? How do you know? It doesn't validate cards you enter into Apple Pay? If you possess the card (or can make one from having possession of the card data) then you can already use it fraudulently, loading it into an iPhone is just an extra unnecessary step for the thief. The security advantage is that malicious terminals can't steal card data, and stealing your method of payment doesn't confer the ability to pay. It's not perfect by any means (and again, not something us consumers need to even care about), merely better than a regular plastic card.
FUD. This is not how Touch ID works. Fingerprint data, which is not a fingerprint image to begin with, more of a hash, is stored on the iPhone's A_ chip itself. It cannot leave the device, ever.
Other posters have addressed the remainder of your incorrect claims.
So it actually does not do much to defeat merchant tracking, assuming you consistently use Apple Pay where it is available.
The root problem with traditional currency is all the trust required to make it work. -- Not that justified trust is a bad thing, but trust makes systems brittle, opaque, and costly to operate. Trust failures result in systemic collapses, trust curation creates inequality and monopoly lock-in, and naturally arising trust choke-points can be abused to deny access to due process. Through the use of cryptographic proof and decentralized networks there is a way to minimize and replace these trust costs.
(Just something that's been floating around in my head lately... Carry on.)
The value is in the willingness of the person holding the i.o.u. to honor that i.o.u.
A "perfect" cryptocurrency provides two of the three requirements of currency (a means of transferring value, and a unit of measurement of that value) but it does not (as no tangible or conceptual thing ever will) provide intrinsic value for the exchange. Value is subjective. Gold is useful today, not so much tomorrow. Gunpowder is useful to you, but not so much to me. Given that it has been debunked that currency arose out of trade and barter (i.e. currency with intrinsic value has replaced items with trade specific value so as to be more fungible), well, where is the value then?
Trust is the value. You trust you can, once your currency is verified, exchange it for something you value from someone. If that person does not trust that the currency you are offering will be able to be tendered elsewhere,,, then no exchange, because the currency is of no value to them.
What if everyone stops using U.S. dollar bills tomorrow? Does my bank account morph into some other value that I can use? Is it tied up in some vault of gold at the US Treasury? No. It becomes a worthless number on a register somewhere. But, the bartender at my local watering hole might vouch for me that I had that much or that I made that much money or that my credit was good. Trust = Credit
Without trust there is only trade and barter. Without the ability to trust that the future will have value in it, I'm only going to go with what is right in front of me right now. And a proof, it's interesting (I loves me some math), but, most of the time, I'm not going to say it has some sort of intrinsic worth that I'd trade, say, you a burrito for it.
Consider Bitcoin - the cost of that trustless system that barely works is mind-boggling waste of electricity. Or look at layers and layers of bureaucracy people create; a lot of it exists to mitigate the problems of lack of trust by creating a system that doesn't depend on actors to be benevolent.
It's true that systems based on trust are fragile - malicious actors can abuse them, and if there are enough of them, the public trust will collapse and the system will go to hell. But that's only an argument for why should we fight for ensuring trust. Why we should punish defectors - the liars, the cheaters, the abusers. Because we need this to be efficient.
This is not how security works. You need to consider the adversarial case, not the average case.
> Consider Bitcoin - the cost of that trustless system that barely works is mind-boggling waste of electricity
The "waste" is actually for the purpose of putting a floor on the cost to trick someone into believing a non-consensus history.
I have a debit card, credit card, Venmo, Square Cash, and a checkbook and I use them all concurrently as I please, because at the end of the day they all interface over ACH with my credit union.
Like you, I'm skipping it, though.
Fair point.
I live in a rural area where I'm sure a majority of people shop exclusively at Walmart. For someone like that, it would probably be a great app to have. I shop at Walmart too, but not as often as my local grocery store and specialty shops. I would much rather pay in one, standard way at all of them instead of some patchwork of differing methods: EMV card here, mag swipe there, NFC here, take a picture of a QR code there. It just adds hassle on top of the direct advertising platform(s) I would be voluntarily installing to my device. The benefits just aren't worth it.
Aside from the digital receipt thing (which, in my opinion, is really only useful if you are planning on returning an item or collecting receipts for tax deduction) where is the additional value with the mobile Walmart app?
It's an awful system, just like the rest of their stuff. I'm sure it's going to be very successful.
Imagine your coordinates being determined to be the entrance of an OB/GYN office, and suddenly getting megs of push spam for your new baby. Or you appear to stand around the parking lot at the sportball field for hours every summer weekend, expect lots of push spam about charcoal, disposable grills, brats, picnic stuff.
What I don't understand is from a market dominance standpoint, why would walmart of all people want that data? Maybe they think they can market the data to other companies. Everyone has to shop at walmart sooner or later, maybe that means everyone will have their app sooner or later, so they'll have lots of privacy to sell to other companies.
I use Android pay and I still think it is harder to pay by phone. I have it in case I forget my wallet at home. http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2015/06/01/why...
The hysterical thing is Apple Watch I saw this guy pay with it and then had to enter the pin and he was doing it through the watch interface. It took him FOREVER and I said "That was simple." He in return said "Simple as Brain Surgery." Don't they already have his finger print???
Don't misunderstand, chip & pin is something the US has long since needed. But the chips are unreliable and entering a pin on some terminals is annoying. A phone with NFC might be easier than that, just fingerprint to unlock, and then press a single button on the phone.
OTOH, NFC credit cards are now also becoming more common in europe too, i.e. https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/
[0] EDIT: it might have happened and I can't remember it, which is effectively the same thing in context.
But I do use my card(s) a great deal. So much so that the contacts on the chip are changing from gold to brown.
I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Only times I've had a swipe fail has been when I mis-swiped the card, and that's entirely on my own klutziness, not any kind of mechanical failure.
The future shouldn't be worse than the present, but it looks like that's the road we're going down...
Although it seems less common over the last several years (perhaps because now physical cards are often replaced several times before they nominally expire?), this used to be a serious problem. The most common fix for a read failure was to put the card inside a plastic grocery bag, pull the bag tight, and then reswipe it. I have no idea how this fixed anything, but I witnessed it working many times.
My mum is a cachier. It is a constant headache where she works. Some tills the staff avoid using until last because the reader sucks so bad.
But, to you, C&P is an infallible technology that doesn't comfort to our normal rules of physics, so I'm sure nothing will convince you.
Contactless cards were introduced relatively recently, where you just tap and go - no verification required (as such there's a limit on the amount you can pay using contactless). These are very speedy, I think more so than Apple pay, and are becoming increasingly popular.
In London (and possibly other places in the UK, I'm unsure) they have actually integrated contactless card readers into public transport, meaning you can hop on a bus/tube and pay for the journey with your card. Essentially, you can carry around a single card to commute, buy your lunch, go shopping and everything else.
I already carry around my driver's license. I already carry around the access card to my school. I already carry around my student ID. I already carry around 3 different library cards. I already carry around my public transport card. I already carry around my debit card. I already carry around cash.
Even if you remove a few of those I still need to carry my wallet with me, so what difference does it make? I mean, other than the loss of separation of identities that comes with the territory. It's fine that my public transport card has low security, because you can't cash it out easily, and it only carries a very limited value anyway. Neither of those apply to my debit card.
Actually there's likely more incentive to pickpocket a wallet for its cash contents, rather than the contactless card(s), given in a lot of wallets this will be both greater and, by definition of course, easier to cash out on! So it seems like carrying contactless cards doesn't add any particular incentive for theft above what has existed forever with carrying cash. Also, any other security vulnerabilities with the debit card, unrelated to contactless, still exist exactly as they do today.
So, it seems to me that merging cards, i.e. adding contactless and the ability to use it for transport, and other things, seems to just add marginal convenience with essentially no added risk of theft or fraud[1]. So yes, it's not a life-changing technology and it won't mean you no longer have to carry a wallet, but it represents a small win and certainly a step improvement for everyday convenience, so that's good right? I for one simply think the fewer cards I have to carry, the better, to be honest.
[1] though I have, to be fair, heard about the issue of thieves 'skimming' contactless cards in people's pockets, I don't know if that was always just a scare story or if it's actually a real exploitable vulnerability - but this seems likely to be a pretty far-flung edge case anyway.
Chip & PIN is not coming to the US. Chip & sign, yes, but no PINs.
But back when we used mag stripes, I used to see failures all the time.
The anecdata in my life says chip&pin is FAR more reliable.
I have however worn out a card that has been in use for a couple of years.
I would beg to differ that the chips are unreliable. Other solutions might be easier, don't know about that though.
I used my apple watch to pay in about 90% of transactions, including parking meters!
Almost all merchants support "Visa PayWave" (aka NFC) so moving my wrist up to the terminal to pay was a fun talking point.
Not one checkout clerk had seen the apple watch used before, because the Aussie banks haven't reached an agreement with Apple yet.
Meanwhile in the states, some idiot retailers actually shut off their NFC readers because they didn't want to support Apple Pay.
I like the idea of Apple Pay. It's not accepted at enough places yet to make it really worthwhile, but I could see contactless payments being a big thing in the future.
We have a VERY large network of point-of-sale registers, all built around the old swipe-to-pay (often requiring signature) credit card model. Replacing practically every POS register in the country is not a simple task; we're rolling out "chipped cards" and new registers to support them (that's a lot of effort & money), but doing so will take most of a year.
That's why Apple Pay is such a big deal, and why the fuss about large businesses trying to roll out their own specialized (and usually inferior) version: yes we're starting to move to chipped cards, but even those are proving slow to use in many/most areas; most of the new registers also support NFC, making Apple Pay's "double tap a button and wave your watch/phone nearby" desirable - IF the store turns on the NFC & infrastructure.
Alas, Walmart is trying to avoid Apple's fees by putting support into their own app, which will be annoyingly slow.
Yeah, well, I'm in Canada and we had about the same thing, yet in the last 5 or so years we've seen 2 major changes (chip and pin followed by tap to pay) and most business have kept up, I haven't used the swipe in 3 or 4 years and the tap I'm now able to use tap at most places.
Is there a problem with adoption in the US for some reason that doesn't exist in other places? Perhaps Interac has some special power here or something.
Credit card: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Select "credit card" 3. Swipe card 4. Answer question about making a donation 5. Confirm credit amount 6. Sign 7. Confirm (This is from memory, but it is roughly correct - I actually fear I may have forgotten a step or two)
Apple Pay: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Wake iPhone and bring near POS terminal 3. Place finger on home button until it buzzes (~1 second)
The flow for Apple Pay could be a little longer if you need to select a different card, but it is still both far faster and far simpler than the regular credit card flow.
I've never had to do this to use Apple Pay from my watch. Is this the flow for chip and pin cards (I've only got chip and signature)? If so - that's fucking terrible.
I love using apple pay from my watch, I don't even have to roll up my sleeve, just double tap the button and hold it near the reader.
I have a sleeve attached to my phone, which holds my bank/credit cards. The only things I carry are my phone and my keys.
That's not how it works. You don't have to enter a PIN to pay with the watch. You just double tap the side button and hold your watch against the reader and the payment is made.
If you lock your watch with a PIN, then you have to enter the PIN the first time you use the watch after putting it on your wrist. As long as you continue to wear it, you don't have to enter that PIN again. If you take your watch off, then you have to put the PIN in again the next time you put it on and want to use it. It's so if somebody steals your watch they can't use it. Entering a PIN is something you tend to only do once when you put it on in the morning.
What probably happened was that he put his watch on in the morning, but didn't use it until he had to pay for something. Then he had to unlock his watch. In the vast majority of cases, the watch would already be unlocked and there wouldn't be any PIN to enter - the PIN isn't used during payment.
I still don't understand the business case other than trying to open a new revenue stream because it certainly wasn't solving a problem
Afaik you can't do that in Europe. At least I've never heard of it being possible.
Conceptually, I don't grasp how possibly exposing my PIN number at a point of sale is MORE secure. I just can't get past the idea that I'm now using the number I use to withdraw funds at an ATM at MORE places than just at my bank.
I doubt it will take much for you to get past it.
And the machine itself checks the PIN against the chip. No sending anywhere, no checking by the clerk.
You only have to trust the machine itself. If you don't, you're fucked anyway because who says a hacked machine will only charge as much as it says it will?
Card+signature is security by "something you have", Card+PIN is "something you have and something you know". That's much more secure.
A signature isn't "something you know" because it's written on the card anyway. If it's not written on the card, then using the signature doesn't do anything in the first place. And nobody checks those signatures anyway. This is why for large purchases they ask to see your ID.
If a machine charged you too much, either it would say so on the receipt and you could protest immediately, or the receipt wouldn't match the charge so you could protest later. Sure, the first few customers might get fucked, but soon the bad machine would be caught. OTOH if the machine processed the current transaction correctly while sending all your codes to the bad guys, it could do so until the store noticed its bad firmware, which could take years.
There's no way around trusting the machine itself.
Banks already correlate fraud reports to where customers have used their cards to track down offending stores that skim cards. They don't have to find the bad firmware, they just have to see "well 10 customers had their cards skimmed, and the only store they had in common was that one"
If someone hacked the terminal I use for an Apple Pay transaction what exactly would happen? It's a one time token that gets passed to the terminal and I immediately get a push update about the transaction.
Most american banks are issuing EMV & Sign cards, which means no PIN. You can set a PIN, but it's not a default flow and you have to call in to get it set.
And we're Chip+PIN here in general. But all merchants provide the Chip+Signature option.
http://www.lowcards.com/emv-transactions-slow-37884
Compared to Apple/Android Pay it's painfully slow, but it's also noticeably slower than swiping.
The process can be slower if the retailer uses an older system that hasn't got a permanent network connection. With some ancient terminals, you could hear a modem dialing up and talking to the bank. That was slow, but luckily those kind of terminals are now rare.
Edit: Swiping used to take 1-2 seconds to process, EMV seems to take about 10.
Worse yet, not all the chip enabled readers have the chip part enabled. So you can stick your card in, wait, and then realize you have to swipe. Otherwise, you swipe, get the suprisingly aggressive BZZZRT sound, and then use the chip reader and wait at least 5 seconds while it authenticates.
I'll time it at the local Target. It's slow.
In terms of speed from fastest to slowest: Apple/Adroid, swipe, swipe and sign, swipe and PIN, dip and sign.
When using a chip, my process is: insert card, wait for transaction to complete, remove card, put everything away, go.
You'll notice that putting stuff away happens in parallel with the transaction in the first case, but they're in series in the second case.
It may be reasonably quick, but it's still noticeably slower than swiping. It's not a big deal, but it's just one of those little annoyances.
If we had chip+pin it would be a different story, but because we have to sign, the EMV+sign process is slower than swipe+sign.
Is this seriously a security measure? Even if it did matter, it's on the back of the card anyways, for someone to copy!
Why not just get rid of it?
The US is way behind on this, it's ridiculous.
So is chip + signature, but that's a different argument.
Having all the important aspects of your life a little distributed isn't the worst thing in the world.
You're out at a restaurant, and you drove there. Your phone dies somehow, either dropped in toilet, or what have you. How do you do the following?
- Pay for dinner
- Drive your car, since your keys were in your phone
- Pay for a cab since you can no longer drive
- Pay for a phone replacement at an Apple Store
etc, etc.
Plus, I'm now going to trust all of my sensitive data to Apple's cloud storage? No thanks.
Lose your phone and you lose your payment instrument and your keys... no thanks.
This is exactly what I thought, but I started using Apple Pay, anyway, because Discover is offering 10% cash back on all in-store Apple Pay purchases through the end of the year. That's too good to pass up. Now that I've been using it for a while, I wish it were available everywhere. It's a small thing, but taking my phone out of my pocket is the most natural thing in the world. Subjectively, the process feels smooth.
Unfortunately, Apple Pay is suffering from the wrong end of network effects. Support is far from ubiquitous, so you don't know whether any given transaction will support it. You can look for the NFC logo, but some places with the logo still don't support it. At that point, it's easier to whip out the card by default. If I've been to a place before and know they take it, I'll usually use it, but there aren't many such places for me.
Because I don't see how the phone can be much quicker when plastic cards support the same contactless transactions, and have no buttons to fiddle with.
The phone can be quicker than a plastic card because the phone is more convenient to reach. It's just in my pocket. Reach in, thumb on home button, put near terminal, approved, put phone away. With a card, I have to get it out of my wallet too. Not a big deal, but not as smooth. (Plus, with today's addictive smartphones and short attention spans, half the time my phone is already in my hand at this time.)
Strictly speaking you can leave the card in your wallet and just hold the whole wallet to the terminal. But this only works if you have exactly one contactless card (or if you don't care which card pays). Unfortunately the US is moving away from such cards. I used to have two or three, but I just checked my wallet and out of the eight payment cards I have in there, none of them support NFC. Sad.
"Hey! How annoying is it that you have to carry AS MANY AS FOUR CREDIT CARDS?"
"Um, it's... not really..."
"Well how about CARRYING FIVE?"
"What?"
"Well, ours merges those together but... it doesn't really work anywhere so."
"TAKE MY $50!"
On the same note, I will never, ever use something like CurrentC that gives those same vendors a direct line into my bank accounts.
Contactless is as quick as a payment will ever be: Hold your card near the reader for less than a second, and you're done. No need to wait for your phone to wake up and accept a fingerprint, fumbling around trying to hold the phone right, and then put it near the reader.
Once contactless cards become more prevalent, Apple Pay / Google Pay becomes pointless.
1) Contactless uses (needs) the same terminal technology as Apply Pay & Android Pay. So all three are in the same boat, and benefit from the expansion of the others.
2) Just speculating, but Contactless will probably move towards a PIN or something of that nature. The whole payment industry is moving towards 2-factor. Contactless by itself is not 2-factor.
I used to be skeptical of contactless cards because of the lack of 2-factor. I thought it would be a liability (if my wallet gets stolen, now the thief can use my cards). However, the UK banks are quite vocal about promising to repay you if this happens. I've never had to put this to the test, luckily.
Also, there is still an element of 2-factor auth. Occasionally, contactless will ask for a PIN confirmation (perhaps random, or perhaps if the bank thinks the payment seems odd). A new card of mine refused to work until I had made at least one PIN payment with it, for instance.
Finally, there are low contactless payment limits - £30 right now. But these have been steadily rising as banks become more confident with their fraud systems. So, it seems that the payment industry is happy with the system.
Why is the extra thing you have to bring with you and probably use a PIN for "just as useful"? Mobile based systems are also interesting because you can just as easily use them for app based sales. Anything to reduce the friction of someone giving you money is going to be a welcome thing for retailers.
As for app based sales, they exist today just fine with credit cards.
I actually think that banks in the future will stop issuing physical cards altogether and will rely on virtual cards linked with Apple Pay, Android Pay or some other contactless based system.
I think the apple watch is considered 2-factor, where you've already cleared the first factor by unlocking the watch with your passcode (or linked phone unlock)?
These guys are some of the best programmers I know and they had nothing but respect for Walmart tech teams.
The first time it came up that I made a casual assumption like "oh, they must be very 'enterprize-y' in their software development." and one of them corrected me by saying something to the effect of "You'd be surprised actually, they're not just surprisingly sophisticated technologically 'for an enterprise' but they're actually surprisingly sophisticated for anyone"
Anyways, small anecdote that stuck with me.
Walmart is apparently VERY strong in the IT side of things.
Walmart Pay is CurrentC all over again with a different name and still the same horrible user experience (download an app, open the app at the register.. give your phone to cashier to scan then go thru all this other POS motions?). As well the underlying fact why Walmart is pushing this to fatten their bottom lines vs. focusing on moving the needle forward for their consumers. Whether it's Apple Pay or another built in Pay service in one's phone no other downloadable app can provide the same world class user experience.
Pick it up. Scan the barcode. Leave.
The digital receipt by its self makes this usefull for me.
Edit: added additional comment
The 2 or 3 times i've used it i've ended up walking out of the store waving the product and the receipt screen on my phone around to make a point of being conspicuous so I don't get jumped on by security.
Starbucks app has a rewards play, Taco Bell app has customization... but without some compelling magic for non-frequent users, I don't see how this helps the company since it doesn't really seem to help the consumer (and so would have limited penetration).
Oops, they forgot to rephrase this to be more clear:
"at any of the open checkout lanes, meaning < 5% of them... because screw you, your time is worthless"
seriously, I bet in the last 10 years I've never had a wal-mart cart that didn't have problems.
Arvest is a growing financial network of banks and related services, which Walmart has been connected to since 1961. It's not a stretch to think that Walmart would create it's own payment network by proxy.
I don't think this is an innovation but more of an evolution of an already existing process.
>> ”The Walmart app was built to make shopping faster and easier,”
I have to get wallet from pocket, open it, take out card and swipe - 4 actions.
OR
I have to take phone from pocket, unlock it by tapping the screen 6 times (dont mess up), opening the app(, maybe navigating to the scanner), then scanning - 4+ actions.
That is neither faster nor, in my opinion, easier.
Where's the benefit for me (as a consumer) with these electronic payment systems?
[edited formatting]
I know security is a big risk with this, but stores DO have self-checkouts.
One step closer to making shopping at the store as easy as going into, picking out what I want and leaving.
PS How much of this was written in Clojure?
Everyone sighs & judges the person paying cash while they hold up the line for everyone else.
The US will eventually catch up, and you'll all wonder why you waited so long.
The probability of finding most things that are cheaper elsewhere than Walmart is extremely small. Their margins and their entire business model depends on that. So your anecdotes of people finding something cheaper is not material.
And finally the good 'ole "solution looking for the problem." It seems it is more and more the default "I-cant-extrapolate-but-this-sounds-clever."