Apple Pay now accounts for 50% of tap-to-pay transactions at McDonald's
Apple Pay certainly wasn't the first mobile payment platform to hit the market, but it's increasingly starting to look like it will be the first to actually have an impact on the way consumers pay for goods and services.
Just days after Whole Foods indicated that it has processed over 150,000 Apple Pay transactions, the New York Times reports that Apple's new mobile payment platform has seen impressive adoption at both McDonald's and Walgreens.
Whole Foods, the high-end grocery chain, said it had processed more than 150,000 Apple Pay transactions. McDonald's, which accepts Apple Pay at its 14,000 restaurants in the United States, said Apple Pay accounted for 50 percent of its tap-to-pay transactions. And Walgreens, the nationwide chain of drugstores, said its mobile wallet payments had doubled since Apple Pay came out.
What's interesting is that the early success of Apple Pay has seemingly created a halo effect around mobile payments in general. The Times points out that similar services like Google Wallet have seen an uptick in usage since Apple Pay first launched. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say.
Still, with Apple Pay an iPhone 6-only feature for now, not to mention the fact that some stores don't have NFC equipped POS terminals (yet), it will likely take a good few months before we can accurately assess the full impact Apple Pay is having. Early indications, though, are exceedingly promising; Tim Cook noted a few weeks ago that over 1 million credit cards were loaded into Apple Pay in the first week after launch. What's more, Cook recently said that getting Apple Pay into China is one of Apple's top priorities.
Going back to the Times report, the "it's easy to lie with statistics" crowd could correctly point out that it's impossible to truly gauge the popularity of Apple Pay at McDonald's and Walgreens without first knowing how many tap-to-pay transactions are being processed overall. 50% sure sounds impressive, but 50% of what?
That said, we'll likely be graced with more specific numbers regarding the prevalence of Apple Pay transactions in the coming months. When that happens, it stands to reason that the numbers will be quite impressive, especially when one considers that mobile payment platforms before Apple Pay were largely DOA.
