Why Walmart Still Hates Apple Pay (and Probably You Too)

Why Walmart Still Hates Apple Pay (and Probably You Too)

Ever wonder why every store seems to take Apple Pay except Walmart? Spoiler: it's not because they're tech-averse boomers. The real reason? They want your data more than they want your money.

Let’s rewind to 2011.

Walmart, Target, Best Buy and a few others got tired of paying 2% credit card fees like normal businesses. So instead of sucking it up, they pulled a full petty billionaire move:

“Let’s make our own payment company!”

Enter: MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange).

This Frankenstein of fintech let them process payments and scoop up your personal data to fuel their advertising engines.

Translation: you became the product.

It flopped.Hard.

Exposed for hoarding customer data and flamed out within a year.

Everyone else bailed and adopted Apple Pay. But Walmart?

Nah.

They went full Gollum over your data:

“Apple Pay won’t let us track customers? Then we don’t want it.”

So they built their own thing: Walmart Pay.

Guess what? It still exists, and yep—it tracks everything.

So next time you’re in line at Walmart and wondering why you can’t just double-click your phone and go, here’s why:

Because Apple said “no” to selling you out,

and Walmart said “no” to Apple.