Walmart’s 12-year Apple Pay holdout ends today — the alternative it built never worked

Starting today, Walmart customers can pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout — a capability that 85% of American retailers have offered for years. For most shoppers, not much changes beyond the tap. But the announcement ends a twelve-year standoff that says something interesting about what payments are really for.

Walmart joined the contactless-payment era in 2014 not by accepting Apple Pay but by building something to compete with it. The company became a founding member of the Merchant Customer Exchange — MCX — a consortium of major US retailers that created CurrentC, a rival system built on QR codes rather than the NFC chips used by Apple Pay and Google Pay. The pitch to merchants was data: a closed-loop app that knew who was buying what, where.

CurrentC was hacked before it launched publicly. Consumer interest never materialized, and by 2016 the consortium shut it down. Walmart responded by launching its own proprietary Walmart Pay app. The external rival collapsed; the in-house replacement remained.

What Walmart has never explained is why it kept blocking Apple Pay and Google Pay after CurrentC failed. The consistent theory from payments analysts is straightforward: NFC contactless transactions are processed through device-generated tokens. The merchant receives a payment reference, not a card number, and not data that can be linked to a customer profile across visits. Apple Pay is not a technology question for Walmart — it is a data question. Walmart has declined to confirm this interpretation, and has not offered an alternative explanation.

The reversal comes alongside weak financial results. Walmart’s stock hit a nine-month low in the months before the announcement, and the company posted its worst single-day drop since 2023 following spring earnings. The announcement framed the change as responding to customers who had ‘repeatedly requested’ the feature, acknowledging the company had been ‘disadvantaging its own customers.’ Walmart Pay will continue running alongside Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The rollout is phased. Select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations go live today. All US stores are expected to follow by the end of 2026. Fuel station terminals will come online by mid-2027.

Apple Pay, now accepted at nine in ten American stores, works today at the one major retailer that spent a decade making sure it did not.

Tags: Apple Pay, contactless payments, digital payments, Google Pay, retail tech, Walmart