Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

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Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by rwsandiego »

According to the following article, Albertsons has deployed Apple Pay chain-wide, including to the former Safeway banners.

https://retailleader.com/albertsons-off ... 0Weekender

Mind you, the Osborne Rd Safeway in Phoenix didn't have it as of Thursday evening.

Wonder when Kroger will jump on the bandwagon.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by storewanderer »

This also enabled use of Contactless credit cards for the few in the US who have such a card, which is a standard card entry method in a lot of other countries and greatly shortens transaction speed/processing time. In the US now there are more issuers who are doing Contactless cards; the Citi Costco Visas are Contactless, Capital One is issuing a lot of Contactless Cards, and American Express will issue a Contactless card on almost all of its products if the customer requests it (and can get to a phone representative who knows what a Contactless card is...).

The stores on the Supervalu systems have been enabled for Apple Pay for as much as 4 years already. The issue came when they started to convert stores on that system, over to the Safeway system, which in turn caused Contactless Payment acceptance to be disabled. Now that they are about to put Jewel, Shaw's, and Acme onto the Safeway system, it appears they decided to find a solution to make it work.

Apple Pay should be enabled in all stores except if the store has IBM Self Checkout (Kroger/CVS type interface), it is not enabled on the IBM Self Checkouts due to some software glitch. It should be enabled soon. Oddly the few stores with the (extremely slow, extremely clunky) old NCR Self Checkout actually are accepting Contactless Payment via the self checkout.

Safeway has enabled MSD Contactless, a 15+ year old technology, which is what most US merchants who have enabled Contactless are currently using (the Contactless transaction mimics a swipe transaction). This is not as secure as EMV Contactless (which to this point has only been enabled in the US large chains Starbucks, Walgreens, McDonalds, and Subway).

One quirk on EMV Contactless is you cannot tap until the total transaction amount is known. This is because many countries have a $ limit on EMV Contactless transactions and it appears though it is supposed to have no limit in the US, some processing softwares have set a limit.

I believe most US Merchants are working to get the certification for EMV Contactless but just like the certifications for EMV Chip it seems to be quite a process.

Kroger seems to be against Contactless payments. A few years ago they ran a test of MSD Contactless at a few stores in each division, then disabled it before they rolled out Chip Processing. More recently, they have disabled Contactless payment at Harris Teeter who previously supported it as those stores have been converted over to the Kroger system. Supposedly there is (or was) some random Fry's somewhere in Phoenix that had Contactless enabled, and it was EMV Contactless at that, a couple months ago.

What is Kroger doing? Who knows. One bad decision after another at Kroger this year.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by pseudo3d »

It wasn't in the distant past that customers used check or cash to pay for groceries. In fact, that was one of the reasons why Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway all introduced card programs, for customer metrics purposes. And therein lies the problem...Kroger continued to invest in technology and keep store bases stable while Albertsons wasn't doing so well and/or closing stores. I wouldn't say the tables be any means have turned since Albertsons still loses money and Kroger still has its market shares intact, but Kroger refusing contactless seems quite uncharacteristic of them.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by storewanderer »

To be fair, some other very large retailers are also refusing Contactless. Target, Wal Mart (even in countries like Canada where it is offered at... every merchant I went to up there but them, they don't have it), CVS... these places all want you to pay with their proprietary payment app programs or in the case of Target the "Red Card" and they seem to think offering Contactless payments will somehow compete with their proprietary programs. As for Kroger, who has no such program, I don't know what is going on or what their excuse is.

But this doesn't really matter. Most grocers offer it, at this point, even most little one store independents offer it. I don't even know of any other grocers who don't accept Contactless payment at this point besides the Kroger chains.

When you look at other retailers, it is offered by some but not all. Macys, Kohls, JCP, all offer it. Dillards/Sears, nope (both of them have pinpads that have the Contactless attachment in some stores though, which would suggest it is coming). Petsmart/Petco both accept it. Walgreens/Rite Aid both accept it. Big Lots/Family Dollar accept it but Dollar General/Dollar Tree do not... so acceptance is all over the place.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by rwsandiego »

storewanderer wrote: October 30th, 2017, 7:51 pm To be fair, some other very large retailers are also refusing Contactless. Target, Wal Mart (even in countries like Canada where it is offered at... every merchant I went to up there but them, they don't have it), CVS... these places all want you to pay with their proprietary payment app programs or in the case of Target the "Red Card" and they seem to think offering Contactless payments will somehow compete with their proprietary programs. As for Kroger, who has no such program, I don't know what is going on or what their excuse is.

But this doesn't really matter. Most grocers offer it, at this point, even most little one store independents offer it. I don't even know of any other grocers who don't accept Contactless payment at this point besides the Kroger chains.

When you look at other retailers, it is offered by some but not all. Macys, Kohls, JCP, all offer it. Dillards/Sears, nope (both of them have pinpads that have the Contactless attachment in some stores though, which would suggest it is coming). Petsmart/Petco both accept it. Walgreens/Rite Aid both accept it. Big Lots/Family Dollar accept it but Dollar General/Dollar Tree do not... so acceptance is all over the place.
Unless more card issuers offer contactless cards it won't gain wide acceptance.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by storewanderer »

rwsandiego wrote: October 30th, 2017, 11:04 pm
Unless more card issuers offer contactless cards it won't gain wide acceptance.
[/quote]

Unfortunately, yes. The card issuers in the US rolled out Contactless cards 10-15 years ago at a time the technology was less secure and hardly any merchants had Contactless enabled terminals.

As with many things, things did not happen here "in sync" and it seems rather than the various stakeholders working together on something, they all take an arrogant attitude and do things their way or no way. 15 years ago it was the merchants not supporting Contactless. Now it is most card issuers not issuing the cards anymore. Add in a media that reported someone could steal your card number if you had a Contactless card in your wallet by standing near you and that killed this idea in the US.

I have been carrying Contactless cards for the past 10-15 years since the various issuers did them at one time or another, and have never once had ANY of those card numbers lifted.

Chase today claims they no longer offer Contactless cards in the US (they issue them by default in other countries) due to "low merchant acceptance." That is their statement as of a few months ago. I countered that by noting how many large chains in the US representing tens of thousands of locations support Contactless now compared to even 2 years ago but so far they stand by their dated, false, and arrogant conclusion of "low merchant acceptance."

It is also much easier and quicker to tap a physical card, than screw around with turning on the Smartphone, password or Touch ID, select the card you want, and then finally tap. These card issuers are allowing a little tiny chunk of the processing fee to go to Apple, Google, or whoever those "pay" apps are supported by. They could cut out that middle pay app fee by issuing Contactless cards of their own that are easy to use. But I suppose the processing fee is the merchant's problem, not the card issuer's problem. And that may be another reason why some very large merchants are not supporting Contactless...
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by rwsandiego »

storewanderer wrote: October 31st, 2017, 9:24 pm...
Unfortunately, yes. The card issuers in the US rolled out Contactless cards 10-15 years ago at a time the technology was less secure and hardly any merchants had Contactless enabled terminals. ....
I know. I work for an institution (not Chase) that began issuing contactless debit cards back in 2007. We finally stopped issuing them a year or so prior to rolling out EMV cards.

For me, ApplePay is a novelty and a nice convenience when I don't have my card with me, like when I am out walking and carry my keys, five bucks, an ID, and my phone or when I go to the coffee shop in my apartment building and don't feel like grabbing my entire wallet. However, it is aggravating when one of my cards simply will not work at Whole Foods despite working at every other ApplePay merchant. As you said, it is an awkward payment method, especially if you have an iPhone 6+ or 7+ like I do (big hands :) )
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by storewanderer »

I have not had any issues with Whole Foods, but do not go there often. The one where I find acceptance issues routinely is McDonalds. At least 1 in about 5 visits, the Contactless there will not work, despite the "tap/insert/swipe" prompt coming up (the cashier has the press Credit to activate the Contactless option there). At one location that I visit at least once a week, they installed new terminals back in about March, at which time they all worked for a while. More recently, the employee told me it only works on registers 1 and 3, but not on register 2. It doesn't seem to get fixed and nobody cares.

I believe most US issuers stopped issuing Contactless cards when the EMV thing got going for cost reasons since it does cost a bit more to add that function to each card. I suppose a bit adds up to millions of bits times the many cards that have been reissued for EMV. Combined with the "low merchant acceptance" and the "low customer use" excuses, I suppose I understand it. But given the number of merchants that now offer the technology, the two sides (banks and merchants) do not seem to be too well aligned. Meanwhile both customers and merchants do not seem happy with the slow processing speed of Chip cards, which is a problem that would be eliminated with Contactless.

Also at those Safeways that do not have it working on their self checkout: you can ask the employee to suspend the transaction and run it on the register up at the monitor station, the Contactless will work there.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by mbz321 »

I don't think the majority of the public generally cares about contactless payments or paying using a phone. It is still just a novelty at this point. I have the Costco Visa with contactless payment and have never once used that feature....funny enough, Costco doesn't even utilize it at their stores (although their terminals read the chip almost instantaneously to avoid slowdowns). I remember in the mid 2000's the contactless thing was tried too (I remember the terminals in the supermarket had an addon thing for 'Mastercard Paypass' and the other credit card brands that offered something similar) and it never really caught on.
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Re: Albertsons Companies Rolls Out Apple Pay

Post by storewanderer »

Why not give the Contactless payment a try at a merchant with the feature on the Costco Visa Card? It is a bit faster than inserting the Chip and it is a very easy transaction flow. Up in Canada, the majority of transactions are via Tap.

Costco has been installing Contactless readers on its gas pumps so I am guessing they will be enabling Contactless soon. The current Quick Chip transaction at Costco processes in 2-3 seconds but if you were able to do a Contactless transaction there I suspect it would process in about 1 second (that's what the EMV Contactless at Walgreens, for instance, takes). Enabling Contactless would shave a few more seconds off of the checkout process at Costco for those who use the Costco Visa card; the cashier could actually just do the tap motion over the pinpad then hand the card back to the customer, vs. handing the card back to the customer for the customer to insert it.

Costco's card processing (and entire checkout process for that matter) is the most efficient I've seen at any retailer. Funny how they do it with equipment that looks to be (but isn't) 30 years old; little old IBM keyboards, old two line green screens. I know it all works at very fast modern speeds but the hardware at first glance is a very dated set up. Meanwhile you have these other retailers installing touchscreen interfaces, fancy display monitors, etc. and yet their checkouts are so slow due to slow systems, slower moving employees...
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