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Comment by jbombadil | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. The level of tracking has gotten to absurd levels.

I needed a couple of grocery items and happened to be next to an Amazon Fresh. Cool, let’s try it! Went in, found everything I needed and went to self checkout. When it was time to pay, the machine wouldn’t accept Apple Pay. I ask an employee who helpfully informs me that I can pay with physical cards or my Amazon account.

I didn’t have my physical cards, nor wanted to do my Amazon account so I had to leave empty handed. Why don’t they accept Apple Pay? Because they can’t track you. If you use a physical card, they can likely link that card number to an Amazon account and thus attribute the purchase to a person. If you pay with contactless payment they get a one time token that they can’t tie to anyone.

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In Massachusetts, they also would have been required to accept cash, as all business locations are.

(It appears that Amazon Fresh has not opened any locations in MA. That's fine with me.)

IIUC, contactless payment via apple pay does have a secondary card number of sorts that's linked to your original card.

I once accidentally paid for AppleCare with apple pay (a mistake), so when at some point I switched phones I had to get new secondary card numbers tied to my physical cards. The old secondaries went away when I wiped my old phone, so AppleCare was no longer able to draw the monthly payment. The number in the invoice was likewise not the original physical card number, but some other number.

Whether the secondary numbers are easier or impossible to track is certainly a question, but I believe there's always a number.

Walmart is the same. I believe it's very very slightly more expensive to process Apple Pay payments (Apple's getting a tiny fractional amount of the sale), and this was the actual sticking point.

Walmart rolled out their own QR code payment plan just so they didn't have to revshare anything. When you're the size of Walmart, you can get away with those types of decisions even though they are technically very much inferior

Payment services like credit cards demand a significant fee for a (nowadays) technically trivial service: instant cash-free payments. These could be replaced with modern instant bank transfer standards, like FedNow in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

These don't require external middle men (like credit card companies) and are therefore almost free. Unfortunately the US is late to the party (in India and some other countries these are already widely used for years), so many banks don't support FedNow yet.

Walmart Pay is fantastic though - Walmart has a very convenient and solid app overall.

It's not any more expensive for the retailer, it's a small fraction paid by the card company. Walmart just wants to track everything about you.

Apple Pay doesn't matter if they're scanning your face. https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...

> Why don’t they accept Apple Pay?

Apple charges for the interchange.

This is the same reason that Walmart doesn’t accept it.

Every credit card company charges interchange fees. Apple charges an additional .15 cents.

Walmart doesn’t accept Apple Pay because they want you to use their app and think they are big enough not to.

> Walmart doesn’t accept Apple Pay because they want you to use their app and think they are big enough not to

You can pay with credit card swipe/insert.

You cannot pay with credit card tap-to-pay, or mobile device.

Swipe versus tap-to-pay has literally nothing to do with an app. But it's because of the extra charge.

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It's funny that you know it's more expensive, and yet claim that is unrelated.

If they were really concerned about interchange fees, they wouldn’t accept American Express cards either. The difference between the interchange fees of Visa vs Amex is much greater than tap to pay versus non tap to pay.

There is a reason that there are a lot more places that don’t accept Amex than don’t accept tap to pay. You see this a lot internationally.

Just this year alone, every mom and pop place I went to in Costa Rica, Canada, UK and France accepted Apple Pay but only merchants in the UK widely accepted Amex.

They are really concerned about interchange.

Walmart will have a negotiated deal with Amex.

Costco used to take exclusively Amex. So it is possible.

In any case, it’s not only the transaction cost but also the availability of an alternative. Forcing a different credit card network is different friction than forcing swipe vs tap. (Or using the Walmart app.)

Do you have any evidence that Walmart negotiated a special deal with Amex to the lower their fees to match Visa and MC?

There are plenty of companies that don’t accept Amex and every Amex user knows that they need to carry a none Amex card with them. Either that or they have never left the country which is doubtful for the Amex demographic.

And I have no idea why this is even an argument on a post about companies wanting you to use their app

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/why-wont-...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/23/walmart-reiterates-why-...

https://www.al.com/shopping/walmart/apple-pay/

Do you have any evidence that they haven’t? You say

”If they were really concerned about interchange fees, they wouldn’t accept American Express cards either.”

That’s a leap, considering that for years a large (but much smaller) retailer didn’t accept anything except Amex.

Maybe, maybe not. Just isn’t sound reasoning.

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I’m arguing against the claim “Walmart doesn’t accept Apple Pay because they want you to use their app.”

In reality they accept non-app payments.

And they don’t accept other non-app payments (I can’t tap my physical card).

Clearly something else is at play. It is well known that Apple Pay would cost them more.

I just posted three links including one quoting a Walmart executive saying they want to steer customers to their own app.

The reason you can’t tap your physical card either because the same technology that allows Apple Pay is used to allow you to tap physical cards.

No, they don't. Apple isn't involved with the transaction processing at all, the phone just acts as an EMV device to transmit the payment details to the terminal.

Incorrect.

https://www.igeeksblog.com/does-walmart-take-apple-pay/

Do you have a reference other than an SEO-optimized slop article? I don't see how Apple could possibly charge a transaction fee for Apple Pay.

Shopify agrees with me: https://www.shopify.com/blog/apple-pay-for-business

> Apple Pay doesn’t charge your business to facilitate the payment

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