Back in April, I gave a status update on my quest to go walletless. In that post, I wrote that although I had been a frequent Walmart customer, COVID-19 had taught me that Amazon would deliver to my door the same things I used to get from Walmart for comparable prices. That’s a pretty serious challenge to Walmart.
If Walmart is going to hang on to their role as the premier retailer, they are going to have to reduce the friction of shopping there. Otherwise, folks will just order things from Amazon. I wrote that one of those things Walmart was going to have to do was to stop being stubborn about Apple Pay and stop clinging to the ridiculous Walmart Pay. I ended the post by saying that until Walmart did that, I wouldn’t be one of their customers. I acknowledged that—obviously—Walmart wouldn’t miss me but I wondered what would happen if there were other folks like me out there.
It turns out that there are. According to the New York Times, people now spend more money at Amazon than they do at Walmart. A lot of that is due to the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, of course, but it does suggest that Walmart is going to have to start listening to their customers and taking their concerns into consideration along with their traditional strategy of squeezing every possible penny out of their costs.
Once you start using Apple Pay or its Android analogue, it seems like an imposition to deal with an actual credit card. A first-world problem, I know, but there it is. The world is moving to digital and while we’re not quite at “go digital or go home,” it’s getting harder and harder to insist on the old ways.