YSK: The reason they were holding out was over a grudge. They co-founded a payment system called CurrenC which rivaled Google Pay and Apple Pay. The idea was, it would draw directly from your bank account, bypassing card processing fees (which are around 3%).

The problem with that was, they required direct bank draft access. Which means they could reach into your bank account and take money without asking you. They were spinning it the exact opposite way, saying that if they discovered a lower price elsewhere, or there was a pricing error, they could fix it without your involvement and just put the money back in your bank account. But nothing would have stopped them from doing the opposite. They review cameras and they think you scanned two things at self-checkout but put three in your bag, they can just charge you for the third item and you might never know.

The bigger problem was, they required your complete medical history to use the service at all. The obvious reason here was that Walmart also operates a pharmacy, but this condition wasn’t optional and was required even if you didn’t use the Walmart pharmacy at all. They really just wanted the data. For their side, they just stated your complete medical history would make it easy for them to suggest products that fit your lifestyle and whatnot, but that was a sticking point for a lot of people.

Naturally, CurrenC failed, and Walmart has been salty about it for over a decade.

Their technology supports tap-to-pay, since they use standard systems that support that kind of thing. They just have it disabled. Their system probably knows when you try to use it, but there’s code in there that tells it to ignore the tap. So really, they just need to push an update that disables the disabling of the feature that everyone else has turned on. So it’s a matter of training and signage.