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Comment by deong | Hacker News Reader

The comments there are pretty much why people talk about a "distortion field" around Apple. It's basically person after person saying, "once all the iPhone 6 users start wanting to pay, they'll have to change their mind."

A few stats (from http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/): Wal-Mart, as a country, would be the 19th largest economy on earth. Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart. There are 100,000,000 shoppers in Wal-Mart every week.

NFC needs to become the way you expect to pay for things. Otherwise, it's Passbook -- that thing you vaguely remember that your phone can do, but that you don't really use, because in the time it takes to figure out if you can, you could just swipe your card.

If anyone's going to push it mainstream in one big push, it will be Apple pairing it with new iPhones. But it's not a given that that's the way it plays out, and every large retailer who pulls out is important.

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> Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart.

Apple here is trying to get into processing payments for your groceries, food and clothes. I'm not sure you've thought through what the statistics are saying.

Every dollar in the US counts payments like mortgage, car, student loans, etc. These are not only high dollar items that make up a huge percentage of most people's monthly expenses, they don't add up to a large frequency. These high dollar low volume payments in effect totally negate the value of looking at Walmart's influence from a percentage of the total US dollars spent.

A quick google tells me Walmart has 11% of the us retail market and an estimated 18% of the grocery market, however again this is not a good indicator of their overall size of pos transactions, it does indicate that their numbers are likely better than 6%.

The real killer app for contact-less payments are not the big wall mart grocery shop. It is small payments that would usually need cash like a sandwich or magazine. These are also the kind of shops where loyalty schemes can be important. Think of the small coffee shop handing out "fifth cup of coffee free" cards. Think how easy it would be for apple to roll out loyalty schemes or promotions and absorb the cost into the transaction fee.

Every other solution for this currently sucks. Someone needs to do it the right way. It's possible that Apple could do it better.

I agree, but all the little coffee shops and convenience stores are more likely to adopt a new payment scheme if it becomes ubiquitous, and for that, it has to be adopted by the Wal-Marts and Best Buys of the world.

That would make my point even stronger then. If Wal-Mart makes up far more than 6%, then it's even more important that they support any retail payment system you expect to take off.

Also interesting to note Walmart receives an absolutely MASSIVE amount of income from food stamps and other federal/state assistance. Their sales surge on days people's benefits are filled.

18 percent of all (national) SNAP sales are conducted at its stores—about $13 billion annually

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big_...

So Apple Pay will need to support EBT cards...

That part is presumably easy enough, but it won't matter if you can't convince Wal-Mart to spend an extra $X per reader across every checkout aisle in their massive network of stores.

If this (from another comment) is true: "A quick google tells me Walmart has 11% of the us retail market and an estimated 18% of the grocery market, however again this is not a good indicator of their overall size of pos transactions, it does indicate that their numbers are likely better than 6%."

Then 18% of all SNAP sales seem incredibly reasonable given they make up 18% of the US grocery market.

Even without that stat, this has always struck me as a substanceless, emotional argument. If you have a program to give people money to go spend on groceries in grocery stores, then they're going to use that money to go spend money in grocery stores.

If you're super concerned there might be a margin on those products, then what's the alternative solution to whatever the stated goal of SNAP is?

I guess you could always scrap SNAP and create government farms and bakeries or something. That could never be less efficient or have any unforseen side effects...

> Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart.

I do not believe you. How can that possibly be true?

I don't know that it is -- I just pulled it from the cited link. The source cites it's own sources, and at a first glance, it seems reasonably well done, but there you go.

Oh, and on second thought, maybe it would have been better to say "through" Wal-Mart. They're not making 6% of the all the profit obviously.

It did sound low so I went to the link and it says 8 cents there.

In the UK it's often stated that £1 in every £7 spent in the UK is spent in Tesco - a large supermarket chain. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8471807/Its-time-Te.... This similarly sounds impossible. Maybe there's some extra constraints they don't mention - just supermarkets, or just consumer spending. I know I certainly don't spend anything like £1 out of every £7 in Tesco, or any other supermarket. For example I'm sure I've spent many times more on buying my house than I will in Tesco in my entire life.

This is the sort of thing that More or Less should look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd.

That must be wrong.

Tesco turnover is £63bn, UK GDP is £1550bn, so it is 4% of GDP, which is equal to total expenditure.

Your house is misleading, as assuming you borrowed the money, that is other people's deferred expenditure (saved money) which you will pay back later, so that nets out when you pay the money back.

Apparently it's "Tesco is expected to confirm this week that one pound in every seven that is spent in British shops goes through its tills." So house sales not included.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548742/1-in-every-se...

2 things.

1. Y = C + I + G + (X − M) .

2. but C is 250838 GBP Million in the first quarter of 2014, 249105 GBP Million in the fourth quarter of 2013. so C is around 1 billion.

Oh, the comment section.

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