1) Contactless merchant fees are lower than dip or swipe 2) Payment terminals are cheaper 3) Less fraud/shrink
This hunk of plastic from Target is a solution looking for a problem.
“Just use contactless” doesn’t work in the US.
Just yesterday a friend was commenting that he got a new credit card (old card expired) and the new one still doesn’t have contactless. Seems his bank decided it wasn’t worth it.
But that’s not all. Target gift cards don’t have contactless. Don’t think Visa/MC/AmEx gift cards do either. I bet EBT cards don’t, I think a rule requiring them to have chips was just passed.
I know other countries are ahead of us, and that major banks have been issuing chip cards for a while. But there are still a lot of people that leaves out.
And target wants to sell to them.
Kroger finally gave up on Kroger Pay if only because they realized customers were still entering their alternate ID/phone number during checkout so they could still link your data together.
The funny part is Walmart in Canada fully allows contactless… almost as if they don’t care they aren’t getting that customer data up there.
No it's because our banking system is dramatically different in Canada and the expectations of the average shopper and the POS options available to them here are all working to force that issue.
Canada had chip and pin and contactless LONG LONG before the US did - and it's easier for us to make these pivots and changes due to fewer banks and pre-defined co-operation agreements.
None of them wanted Apple Pay/Google Pay/Samsung Pay to succeed. They wanted their own thing to get out from having to pay credit card fees.
Weren’t they all members of that ridiculous CurrenC project that completely flopped?
The EBT, gift card, and lazy small banks would get their act together pretty damn quick, I'd wager.
Come back when your state government decides to pay to re-issue every card with better technology.”
That’s cruel. The move to EMV was only recently mandated for EBT (if I remember correctly and it was done at all) because so many people were having their benefits stolen by mag stripe skimmers.
You can’t use a stick against powerless people to affect change. It just makes them suffer.
Even if Target did mandate contactless, the stock would plummet on news of all the lost sales and the CEO would be out. The new one would reverse it immediately.
When you're dealing with tens of thousands of terminals that you want to check on a regular basis across thousands of stores, having a device that verifies things quickly is a solution to a real problem.