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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I am 37 years old and I have never ever found payments to have any friction, my 1950s/1960s parents feel the same with the credit card being the last significant technological advancement.

All the rest have been many but minor quality of life improvements here and there, but payments have been frictionless for as long as I remember.

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Using my phone to pay is pretty low friction. There's literal friction to pulling anything out, but the phone comes out much more easily than the financial xenomorph of pulling my wallet out, then pulling a card out of the wallet. Then I have to stab the chip end in a reader since I have yet to find one that supports tap to pay.

As somebody who has a broken wrist right now: yes, it’s A LOT easier and frictionless to use phone than having to pull out/put back in a card.

I dropped my phone a couple inches into a rug and now it’s covered in tiny glass shards so I’d have to disagree. Hope your wrist heals up soon.

Then don’t drop your phones

I changed my mind about your wrist.

Keep the card in the pocket directly.

It’s even easier to tap my smart watch! I love it and I feel more secure than getting my card out.

> I have yet to find one that supports tap to pay

Interesting. I haven't seen one in years that doesn't support it in the US. Most of the time even when I hand my card to a cashier because the terminal is by them, they tend to tap it.

I was at a Walgreens once where they had it disabled and the cashier sighed and said the manager disabled it because tap incurred a slightly higher processing fee than inserting the card. This was a couple of years ago and not sure if it's true, but that's what the cashier said the manager said.

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