Apple announced last week that Apple Pay has been rolled out at several grocery chains in New England, southeast Texas and Chicago. In addition to Whole Foods, which was one of the first chains to introduce Apple Pay, other stores running the program include Associated Food Stores, Shaw’s Supermarkets, Jewel Osco, Albertson’s and Harvey’s and Winn-Dixie.
Some of these stores are no strangers to new grocery store technologies, as several of them also use Instacart, a program which delivers to a customer’s home in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Houston, Denver and Boulder. Instacart also supports Apple Pay.
Meanwhile, some major chains in the U.S. are choosing not to support Apple Pay, or choose other options such as Merchants Customer Exchange. These chains include CVS, Rite Aid and Walmart. These chains may not be fighting mobile payments for long, as the mobile payment market is expected to expand from $52 billion this year to $142 billion in 2019.
