[jbombadil]

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.

[phyzome]

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.)

[aduitsis]

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.

[StilesCrisis]

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.

[dylan604]

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

[evilduck]

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.

[Tylast]

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

[paulddraper]

> Why don’t they accept Apple Pay?

Apple charges for the interchange.

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

[raw_anon_1111]

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.

[piperswe]

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.