Major American drugstore chain Rite Aid has announced that it’s going to start accepting mPayments on August 15th. That applies in all 4,600 of its US locations.
That means the company will accept Apple Pay, Google’s Android Pay (when it’s available), Google Wallet payments, and presumably any other major mPayment platforms launched later this year. Its adoption of NFC technology also enables the chain to accept contactless payments via credit and debit cards.
Explaining the move in a press release, Rite Aid CEO Ken Martindale framed it as a customer service matter. “Increasingly, consumers are actively seeking out and incorporating mobile technology into many facets of their life, including their shopping and purchasing decisions,” he said, adding that enabling the mPayment options lets the company “offer Rite Aid customers an easy and convenient checkout process, which we know is important to them.”
The mPayment adoption is one of the most neutral and forward-thinking embraces of mPayment seen from a major retailer yet; in many other cases, individual mPayment platforms have had to campaign to get brands’ support for their own platforms specifically, rather than for mPayment and contactless payments generally. It is perhaps worth noting that Rite Aid’s announcement made no mention of PayPal specifically, despite that company’s increasing efforts to get in on the mPayment game, but PayPal hasn’t yet launched a comprehensive mPayment platform, and presumably Rite Aid will be ready to enable any such platform once it is available.
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