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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked nobody used contactless payments in the first place.

Really? In Canada, almost everyone uses them and almost everywhere supports them

Also very widely in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Some American visitors were recently surprised when I said interbank transfers clear within the hour. The environment in the US is quite different to the rest of the world.

It's definitely a US thing. Here in Australia, everyone hardly uses Apple Pay and all major banks have their own cards/app that does NFC payments.

I find it really strange that it is not widely adopted in the US since it removes a lot of friction when it comes to paying for stuff ergo encourages more business. I.e. my usual coffee joint was always packed in the mornings and since they adopted NFC payments a few years back, I noticed the usual bottleneck queue of people paying at the cashier is significantly less unless someone starts jiggling for coins.

Experience here is the complete opposite. When I buy a coffee I hand the guy a few bucks and leave. If the clown in front of me starts waving their iPhone at the terminal, I start rolling my eyes and tapping my fingers.

Contactless from credit/debit cards are a lot faster and more reliable. You just tap the card against the chip reader. In the rare occasion where it doesn't work (e.g. cost is too high, too many purchases per day) you can just slot the card into the slot and enter pin - which takes maybe 10 seconds instead of 1.

As one of those "clowns" I wish there were more like you as I'm always waiting for someone to grab exact change. You can even order from your phone at some places... actually, the order process is what I find also slows things down. I'd love to put in my order directly by phone and skip that line entirely.

Tipping probably has something to do with this. On US EFTPOS terminals you're prompted to add a tip/percentage/cash/okay/okay/okay/pay with card.

In Australia you're given a total, the cashier sees the card in your hand, asks "Paypass?", and bang, it's done. Entire transaction is over in <10 seconds, and the only customer interaction with the terminal is waving a card over the top of it.

Additionally, the lack of tipping means that people who pay with cash expect their exact change back and will wait for it, or will fish around for coins to find the exact amount, which slows down transaction processes.

10 seconds would be the extreme end of things. Most of the time it takes more like 3 or maybe 4.

Worse, they're using an affinity card, which takes extra time.

Even worse, they're being signed up for an affinity card, which takes several minutes.

Well, people don't have to jiggle for coins. They can just swipe the card, which is usually just as fast if not faster than NFC, and pretty much guaranteed to work 99.99% of the time whereas NFC has failed on my at least 20% of the times.

Yeah, but I see people using cards contactlessly (oof..) but rarely using their phone, and when I do it seems clunky and awkward...

I've been using my Apple Watch With Apple Pay for the past few months and all it takes is to tap my wrist to the terminal

I had heard that contactless was moving backwards in Canada; used to be more widespread but now fewer places accept it. True?

I don't have hard statistics, but it seems as common as ever. I use tap2pay every day.

Anecdata: I think there was a period where stores didn't know they had it on on their POS', so it was a little more widespread out of the gate and then went back down as they disabled it. But that process seems more than reversed now.

For the most part the holdouts have been restaurants, as many POS devices had the tip/authorize order backwards (if enabled, tap would bypass the tip step). That's changing now and I've been to a few restaurants with tap now.

Not in my experience. I've found more places slowly accepting it as the few with the remaining old terminals that only supported chip+pin are being replaced by newer units that have contactless.

A year or two ago I used to rarely see the contactless part taped over with a message saying "No paypass" or whatever, but I can't remember the last time I saw that anywhere. Even Costco now takes contactless up to $200 now.

You're right. Usage in the U.S. is falling [1] and low compared to other markets, e.g. the U.K. and Canada [2].

[1] "[As of March 2016] only 3.5 percent of eligible transactions for those consumers are via Apple Pay, down from 5.9 percent in March of 2015 and 4.6 percent in October. Eligible transactions are those where the consumer has the right phone and merchants have the right enabling POS technology — that is the intersection of consumers with iPhone 6/6S’s and merchants with contactless terminals."

http://www.pymnts.com/apple-pay-tracker/2016/apple-pays-big-...

[2] http://www.pymnts.com/nfc/2016/uk-lessons-for-us-mobile-paym...

Most of my friends use Apple pay in cabs in New York and in Whole Foods.

I use it whenever I can, which honestly is pretty much only when I go to McDonald's.

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