olivertwist

lolliver said:

Most people can get their phone out of their pocket much faster than you can pull out your wallet and get a card out.

That is EXACTLY why I love Pay so much. I have been pretty vocal about wanting the NFC terminals at certain stores in Germany to allow Pay transactions. Yeah, I know Pay is not officially introduced in Germany, but I have been using Pay since the first day in October 2014 at surprisingly many places that have NFC terminals. That includes ALDI Süd, the stalwart of cheapiness.

I never forget the first time I used Pay on the first day of roll-out in October 2014. In Germany. Yes, Germany. At REWE supermarket and Starbucks Coffee.

What surprised me the most was how many places that have NFC terminal and that accept Visa/MasterCard allowed Pay transaction. That includes the stalwart of cheapiness, ALDI Süd. My favourite part about using Pay was the surprised reaction from the cashiers and people in the queue at the check-out. The beauty of using Pay is I don't have to sign the receipt, including the €289 transaction at Conrad Electronics.

Yeah, I had to reconfigure my iPhone to US region in order to add the American bank card then reverted iPhone back to German.

rcfa said:

The absurdity is, I pay nearly everything with ApplePay in Austria, except in the few stores which don't accept credit cards at all.
i get surprised looks, questions etc. except where I'm a regular and thus known to pay that way.
The infrastructure is there, the card issuers are not.

In the US it's reversed: almost all cards support ApplePay, but most vendors don't have the required NFC terminals, particularly not the roaming ones that come to the table in restaurants, can't really do ApplePay when the vendors need to take your card to the POS...

It still escapes me why Apple didn't aggressively pursue rolling out ApplePay where the required infrastructure is in place, it's years of revenues and sales lost...

Me, too! I was in Salzburg yesterday, and I used Pay everywhere that has NFC terminal. That includes the ticket vending machines for Salzburg public transportation. I definitely think Austria would get Pay sooner because the infrastructure with NFC terminal is more widespread there and because more and more Austrians use the contactless payment cards.

Of course, there are a few holdouts like Tchibo with ancient credit card readers, Osteria pizzeria with NFC function disabled, and so forth.

The cheapest I ever paid with Pay was €0,69 for a 1-litre bottle of Vöslauer water at SPAR self-checkout terminal. SPAR has great promotion video playing on its credit card reader display screen, showing the exciting world of using contactless payment.