Apple CEO Tim Cook Announcing Apple Pay

Tim Cook does not appear too concerned over retailers blocking Apple Pay. On stage at the WSJDLive conference taking place in Laguna Beach, California, he referred to the continuing issue of merchants blocking Apple Pay as merely a “skirmish”.

Since Apple Inc. announced the launch of Apple Pay last month retailers Wal-Mart and Best Buy both confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that they would not allow customers to use Apple Pay to pay for purchases.

Now retailers Rite Aid Corp. and CVS Health Corp. have joined them. A leaked internal memo from Rite Aid indicated that NFC readers were being disabled in an effort to prevent customers from using services such as Apple Pay, Google Wallet and SoftCard, which work via NFC technology. Although the leaked documents were not authenticated, Rite Aid’s public relations team did confirm to iMore that Apple Pay is no longer supported. On Saturday CVS sent out an email to its stores informing staff that NFC will be switched off.

This move by merchants is being attributed to the fact that they have their own mobile payment system in the making, CurrentC, which is set to launch early in 2015. CurrentC is of course the mobile wallet from Merchant Customer Exchange of which Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Rite Aid and CVS are all members.

Cook’s reaction is probably bolstered by the fact that during the first 72 hours of Apple Pay, Apple activated 1 million cards.  “Over the long arc of time,” he says, “retailers will have to do what shoppers want.”

The underlying technology (NFC) and mobile payment players such as Google Wallet are not new, but Apple’s entry into the market has certainly added fuel to the fire.  Cook says this is because Apple Pay is easy to use and that “retailers will use Apple Pay because it is more secure”.

In the interview Cook made a privacy pledge to users: “We’re not Big Brother,” we’re not collecting your data. “We’ll leave that to others.”