If you live somewhere where you don't need to drive and can put a mass transit smartcard on your phone, I can see that playing into a decision to go without a wallet (especially if you can use NFC payment everywhere). But yeah, considering Chase Pay's low merchant acceptance when using a non-Samsung phone, I'm not sure most people can even come close to thinking that.

The Chase Pay app displays "WALLET" at the top of the screen. The implication is that your wallet is in the phone. If I were using Apple Pay (Visa) instead of Chase Pay, Apple states: No mention of a driver license. FaceID/TouchID achieve the same confirmation in Chase Pay.

According to "Visa Rules" which I assume is contractual to Chase Freedom Visa in the Chase Pay app, the merchant cannot require customer identification in order to complete a transaction. Kroger takes their policy to another level by recording customer ID in their registers. Apparently Kroger is a large enough merchant that Chase or Visa does not enforce the merchant agreement.

In the end, the promo of 10% Cash Back at Frys was a bust; it doesn't seem that Chase coordinated this program with Kroger. Back to plastic.

In my experience, customers for the most part want their IDs being checked, so they're not going to be particularly inclined to file complaints with the card networks in the first place. But that's a discussion for another thread.

How exactly did this happen? Was it the cashier who asked you for ID, or the app? If the cashier did it, do you think the register prompted her to do so, or did she do it on her own initiative? I can imagine a cashier who is not familiar with Chase Pay being suspicious of it and deciding to check ID just to make sure. Back when Samsung Pay was new, I had a couple of cashiers either ask for ID or call a manager over because they weren't familiar with it and thought I was doing something shady.

It was a register prompt. Apparently Chase Pay transactions over a certain amount ($100?) triggered the prompt which precluded the cashier from completing the transaction (which was approved by Chase). There was a window in the cashier's screen to record driver license info. It could not be overridden by a manager.

Later, the same amount using the actual Chase Freedom Visa plastic card went through without any prompt, but earned only a 4% bonus.

The implication is that the app has a wallet into which you put cards, just like a physical wallet. The app is on the phone.

And, irrelevant of any ID scheme that your phone may have, the merchant doesn't have to accept it.