The launch of Apple Pay was met with resistance by retailers hoping to kill the new payments solution, but after just one week of waging a war on Apple Pay, MCX is already starting to see its death grip on CurrentC supporters begin to weaken.
Meijer, a popular supermarket chain in the Midwest, says it has no plans to stop accepting Apple Pay at its 213 stores, even though its a member of the MCX consortium backed by Walmart, Target, BestBuy, Gap, and over 50 other stores that want to replace your wallet the unlaunched CurrentC service.
In an interview with Michigan Live, Meijer spokesman Frank Gugielmi confirmed that the company supports both Apple Pay and other solutions, despite reports that MCX members receive steep fines for accepting anything other than CurrentC.
“We have had the technology in our stores to accept mobile wallets for several years now. If a customer has Apple Pay capability, our hardware works with it. We don’t plan to remove or disable these systems.”
Meijer’s move to keep Apple Pay enabled comes days after CVS and Rite Aid both disabled Apple Pay on their payment terminals. The retailers’ war on Apple Pay sparked a boycott supported by both iOS and Android fans alike that MCX has tried to squash by assuring users their data is safe in the cloud – even though MCX was recently hacked.
MCX COO Scott Rankin told Recode that using Apple Pay would not disqualify Meijer from CurrentC, but he didn’t specify whether they would face some type of penalty.
“I think if they want to go forward and continue to accept Apple Pay, down the road at some point if they want to be a customer of MCX and roll out CurrentC and offer it to customers that’s great.“In the future I think there will be multiple platforms available not just at MCX merchants but everywhere.”
Rankin admitted that the MCX is banning Apple Pay to help CurrentC get a head start, but the QR-based wallet/loyalty program isn’t expected to launch until 2015. Apple Pay is already available at over 220,000 stores in the U.S., and retailers don’t even have to join a league of super-mega evil stores to use it.
