Apple Pay at Meijer
With the wave of an iPhone 6 or the yet-to-be-released Apple Watch, you can buy groceries or fill up your gas tank at Meijer using Apple Pay.
(Andrew Krietz | MLive.com)
WALKER, MI — With a wave of your iPhone 6 or the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch, you can buy groceries or fill up your gas tank at Meijer using Apple Pay.
This isn’t a case of the Midwest retailer signing on to accept Apple’s new online payment service, but rather that it syncs with mobile pay technology already available at its 213 stores.
“We have had the technology in our stores to accept mobile wallets for several years now,” said Frank Guglielmi, Meijer spokesman.
Meijer installed Near Field Communication technology, also known as “tap and pay,” five years ago for its branded MasterCard and Visa credit cards. Since then, it has been used by customers with other payment methods such as Google Wallet, which was introduced in 2012 for Android phones.
"If a customer has Apple Pay capability, our hardware works with it," Guglielmi said.
Apple Pay has grown into the biggest mobile payment system since it was launched Oct. 20, reports the Associated Press. The free service lets people make purchases using a credit card or debit card, and a thumbprint.
iPhone 6 owners set up 1 million Apple Pay accounts in the first 72 hours it was offered, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Monday.
Apple Pay, which works with the six largest credit card companies, can be used at more than 200,000 storefronts across the country. Retailers accepting Apple Pay include McDonald’s, Whole Foods and Walgreens.
Over the weekend, pharmacy chain Rite Aid and CVS disabled Apple Pay from their stores along with Google Wallet. Walmart, Best Buy and Target are also refusing to accept Apple Pay.
The store chains are part of Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, a retailer-led mobile wallet initiative launched last year to develop a competing system that will be available next year. Their system, called CurrentC, would cut out credit card companies and their processing fees while collecting data on shoppers’ buying habits.
CurrentC, which would draw money from a checking account similar to a debit card, has been criticized for being more difficult to use than Apple Pay, and not as secure.
Still, the consortium boasts more than 50 retailers that collectively operate nearly 90,000 storefronts and process more than $1 trillion in payments annually.
Meijer is both a member of MCX and listed on Apple’s site to use Apple Pay. At this point, Meijer does not plan on blocking Apple Pay.
“We don’t plan to remove or disable these systems,” Guglielmi told MLive on Tuesday.
The New York Times reported today that retailers who signed up for CurrentC are legally forbidden from accepting Apple Pay.
"If these retailers break their contracts, they will face steep fines for doing so," reports the NYT's Mike Isaac.
But Peter Carstensen, who teaches antitrust at the University of Wisconsin Law School, tells Reuters that approach could be a violation of antitrust laws if there is an organized effort by the retailers to drop Apple and Google's payment services.
There's a rush to gain a foothold in the mobile pay market, which will grow to a $90 billion by 2017, forecasts Forrester Research.
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Shandra Martinez covers business for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her or follow her on Twitter @shandramartinez.