diburning

You must have been at a store with an older pin pad firmware version. After rebooting pin pads at stores for the past few days, I can tell you that the dots show up on the loyalty screen, but are always missing from the Insert/Tap/Swipe payment screen regardless of whether contactless is working on the pin pad.

If processed as EMV, pin is forced. If for some reason the mobile wallet does not process as EMV, the pin prompt will show up and allow a pin-pad-side bypass as if the card didn't have a chip, and then it will decline for invalid pin.

tmiw

Weirdly, I've only seen the behavior you've described until now. Then again, I don't think I've ever been to the location that I went to the other day before, either.

While Safeway does have the right to route debit card transactions however they want, I imagine that'll cause some complaints. Too bad CDCVM isn't really a thing for debit cards on anything other than Visa/MC.

Marschel

No reaction from my iPhone when I tried to tap on every possible side?! also why do play games with customers instead of clearly mark the reader?! I'm mean Walgreens can do it why not Ralphs?

cjw2001

It's not that Kroger (Ralphs) can't do it, it is that they've chosen not to.

RedLight2015

tmiw

Maybe, but I'm not sure what to make of the random locations occasionally showing up on the MC map. AFAIK only NFC transactions trigger a merchant showing up on there, so it can't be people using Samsung Pay doing it.

tmiw

My local Target now has contactless support. Using my debit card in Google Pay at the Starbucks inside indicates that the global AID was used (not the common one, as I initially thought it would). As a result, no PIN required.

Additionally, the self-checkout payment options seem to be slightly different than before but I don't know if that's because I ended up on a cash-accepting station or if there was actually a change. See below:



(Pushing "card payment" still only says insert/swipe with no indication that tap is allowed other than the dots on the terminal.)

I also didn't see any signage promoting contactless, but that might come later.

RedLight2015

ateng

This article claims that Wells Fargo will issue contactless cards in the next few months and BOA over the summer. I spoke to a BOA teller and she said a roughly similar timeline. https://www.digitaltransactions.net/...m-visa-direct/

scibot

I went to a Target closest to me and still the same old software with no dots and no wallet option so that means I will be looking out for the wallet option in a week or two. Also the cartwheel apps stinks as you need to hook to Target wifi to use it while contactless does not need data to work. Which I remember people saying on here before it needs data to work and Targets often have very poor cell service inside. But you can also just use the cartwheel app for coupons then pay with Apple/Google Pay or a card which is alright but you still need wifi for that app to work.

Hawaiian717

tmiw

I wonder if BofA will limit contactless support to a subset of cards (say, only on Travel Rewards and the affiliate cards with no FTF). I would think Chase on their own would account for nearly all of the 100 million card figure considering they seem to be proactively replacing them.

storewanderer

I think Kroger has Contactless but keeps "killing" it. So if someone tries it right after a system update or reset, it may work. Then it gets killed rapidly. That is why their locations keep showing up off and on the map.

You have to keep in mind how screwy their payment processing situation is. They have EMV at regular registers. At stores with drive through pharmacy, the pinpad attached to the drive through register is swipe only/no EMV/still has "input PIN or press enter for Credit" for all Debit cards... then stores with fuel station are on yet another card processing arrangement at the fuel station again with swipe only but a different merchant account.

Fortunately Kroger's CIO who was talking up how great Chase Pay is (how's that going) and how easily they can implement it without adding new equipment and how Apple Pay/NFC requires new equipment (really, those MX915s have NFC built in) and how it gets so little use in the tests they did for a short time period in few stores, is going to "retire" so we can hope they get some people in there who will support NFC payments. Hopefully that "Kroger Pay" idea that appears to be in development will just get shelved (throwing a lot of money away there) and they will move to industry standard/global standard NFC and get it over with. Just like CVS did.

Still tough to get my head around the fact that Safeway with historically lousy technology has leapfrogged so far past Kroger on payment processing technology the past couple years. EMV, EMV Contactless, even EMV at the gas pump. Pretty impressive.

tmiw

You'd think people would have mentioned that by now if that's the case. Then again, MacRumors only talked about Target and contactless when they finally rolled out to all stores, so...

IMO, interchange issues are likely the root of why many of the holdouts are still keeping it disabled. Kroger for instance likely wanted Chase Pay because transactions with it would possibly cost less than regular EMV ones.

That said, since Kroger uses the same POS software as Safeway (IIRC), they may be more open to it now that it's possible to force debit routing on contactless. Credit cards would still be an issue for them, however, hence their probable opt-out of that merchant class action settlement and continued lawsuits against the networks.

tmiw

BTW Citi and other Mastercard issuers committed to rolling out contactless cards within the next two years, totaling around 300ish million cards. All it took was Chase to trigger it, apparently, as AmEx had it for a while (albeit on an opt-in basis until recently).