Chinese Tourists Challenge Cash’s Reign in Japan

wsj.com

20 points·aerophilic··7 comments

I've been living in Japan for about 6 months and recently I've felt a very aggressive local push to get people to use these barcode payment apps. For example I recall in January PayPay were offering a discount at FamilyMart (a konbini/convenience store) for signing up and using their app, then a few weeks ago LINE Pay had a similar promotion. Both apps offer loyalty points for paying with them.

But what's strange is this feels like a backwards step; you can also pay with your train IC card in konbini and now that you can get Suica (one of the train IC cards) on Apple Pay and Google Pay it's significantly faster to use that than unlock your phone, open LINE/PayPay and get the barcode. LINE Pay also have their own prepaid card and Mercari just launched their own prepaid card built into Apple Pay too.

Still, I wonder which (if any) will come out the winner and how many more will pop up in the meantime.

>But what's strange is this feels like a backwards step

Because it really is. And yet this is again the cheaper, arguably good enough alternative won. I don't like this QR Code future either, and I am not sure if anything can be done at this point.

Meanwhile, do all the ATMs still shut down at night?

flagged for being paywalled

While I don't like Paywalled post, I dont think you should flag a post just for being paywalled. And that is not how it works here on HN. From the FAQ

>Are paywalls ok?

>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

>In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

What is the WSJ workaround?

outline.com still works

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