Well, you can't win 'em all. While Apple may have had an absolutely smashing success with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus – within the first week of release the devices netted a record 10 million in sales (the best launch for an iPhone ever) – the company's new mobile payment program doesn't seem to be going as smoothly.
The problem is not that Apple Pay doesn't work well. Quite on that contrary. In fact, as many user demonstrations have shown, the platform provides a painless, secure and extremely quick method of payment – one that calls into question how we used credit cards (or, gasp, actual money) all these years. Nope, it's not a weakness in Apple's program that's causing the deployment to not go swimmingly. Rather, it's the fact that it's too good at what it does, and businesses are feeling threatened.
Apple Pay experiences the wrath of corporate greed
Every day, every hour, every minute, someone somewhere is experiencing the cruel gut-punch of corporate greed. Whether it's an employee at a large corporation who's being shortchanged on a benefits package or a customer who's paying a "service fee" to get a specialist on the phone, greed and its various permutations surround us. And now Apple Pay is bearing the brunt of that greed.
In a relevant article entitled "How Corporate Greed Is Trying to Kill Apple Pay," Gizmodo contributor Eric Limer describes a peculiar situation that's arisen with the widespread emergence of Apple Pay: As more people begin to use it, the pool of businesses where it's applicable has suspiciously dwindled in recent days. First, Rite-Aid put an embargo on Apple Pay transactions, according to USA Today. CVS soon followed suit. Walmart's in the mix as well. As this list suggests, it's not just a few small players staging an Apple Pay resistance. Indeed, stores CVS and Walmart are corporate behemoths, and what they choose to do could likely set a precedent for the rest of the enterprise sphere. So what exactly turned them off to Apple Pay? According to Limer, it was plain old-fashioned envy and opportunism.
Limer says that the disabling of Apple Pay in these stores represents "a scheme to avoid paying credit card fees on the millions of transactions they process every day. One that requires them to circumvent Apple Pay and other NFC technologies with a system of their own devising called CurrentC."
Wait, Curr-wha-wha-wha? What's CurrentC? Have you heard of this? Because we sure haven't. And that seems to be the point. As Limer points out, the decision on the businesses' parts to pull Apple Pay represents something of a preemptive strike, a move that anticipates the emergence of CurrentC, which is a retailer-based mobile payment method that will basically function to eradicate credit card fees that businesses currently have to pay for patron transactions, according to TechCrunch.
It turns out that the scheme to implement CurrentC has been in the works since 2011, headed by a Walmart-sponsored company called MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange). Currently, there are many different businesses that look to be aligned with CurrentC. As TechCrunch points out, it's a service that is totally geared toward the business.
"The idea behind MCX was that if enough retailers teamed up, they could convince consumers to adopt their mobile payment system that would let retailers avoid paying credit card fees in the 2 percent to 3 percent range by processing payments through Automatic Clearing House transactions through bank accounts that have much smaller fees," the article stated.
So there you have it folks. The Apple Pay revolt begins. We know what side we're on, and it's not Walmart's.
