Featured by MLive, a Michigan-centric publication, Meijer is a Midwest grocery store chain that features a pharmacy, photo processing, and some gas stations. The company has had NFC-capable payment terminals for five years, putting it well at the vanguard of retailers supporting the then-nascent payment technology.
Meijer has accepted Google Wallet transactions since the search giant launched that technology in 2011, and since Apple Pay is built around some industry standards, that payment system worked out of that gate at Meijer's stores.
Of course, that was also true of Rite Aid and CVS. All three companies are part of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), the company trying to reshape mobile payments in its own image. As such, all three companies are contractually prohibited not to accept mobile payments from any other system, but Meijer apparently has no plan to bother honoring that idiotic requirement.
“We have had the technology in our stores to accept mobile wallets for several years now,” Frank Guglielmi, a spokesperson for Meijer, told MLive on Tuesday. “We don’t plan to remove or disable these systems.”
Which seems a tad more sensible than, say, Rite Aid or CVS. Just saying.