Walmart is the last major US company to add Tap to Pay

Walmart: More Ways to Pay: Tap to Pay Is Coming to Walmart and Sam’s Club

beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

Maybe I'm just too close to this because I actually work in payments and know how this works, but I find the lack of specificity in the reporting this week, from the tech blogs I follow, to be kind of frustrating. Maybe I’m just annoyed by the reporting around how Apple Pay works often being about as accurate at the “Christopher Nolan doesn’t use CGI,” reporting on social media.

Sure, Apple Pay will work, but so will Google Pay and Samsung Pay, other niche digital wallets, as well as just tapping your plastic card to the reader. This is because what Walmart is specifically implementing is Tap to Pay, a long-time industry standard that Apple, Google, and a few other companies package up in their own proprietary ways (they get a tiny fraction of the transaction if you choose to play that way).

All that said, I can't be mad about this news, as it's a great development for consumers, no matter how they choose to tap to pay.