The trouble is retailers. I'd use it everywhere if people would support contactless payments. It's how I pay at Sprouts every time.
Heck, Kroger has new terminals that should support contactless payments AND chip based payments, but neither work. Same with my liquor store. Same with IKEA. At IKEA the terminal has a card slot but also has a note taped to it saying "please swipe". At the other two the slot simply does nothing.
But it's more fun to blame Apple and "apathy" than how broken payments are in the US.
Countless times at Whole Foods and Home Depot where I walk up to the terminal with my phone and the cashier says, "Sorry, it doesn't work". These are flag ship Apple Pay retailers.
I think this is often just ignorant employees (not their fault; they probably haven't been properly trained). I've run into the "that doesn't work" thing at Whole Foods a couple of times, and both times it worked perfectly when I insisted on trying it. The employee was amazed, and said they'd never seen it work before.
I have run into problems at Subway, which is supposedly an official Apple Pay merchant. I can almost never get it to work there (and often they keep the terminal behind the register, so you have to ask for it and convince the employee to give it to you if you even want to try).
I'd love to understand the logic of why a retailer would buy all these payment terminals that "don't work". I run into this scenario a lot in the stores I frequent: I notice that the store has a fancy new payment terminal with the RFID logo on it. Great! Try Apple Pay. Cashier: "Sorry I don't think that works." OK, I pull out my physical card and slide it into the EVT (chip card) slot. Cashier: "Nope, that doesn't work either. Can you just swipe it?" OK, so you went to all the trouble to buy these fancy new payment systems, and you're still doing everything the 1980's way?
Those terminals "don't work" yet. The hardware as you mentioned is there (slot/RFID) but it needs to be enabled by the software loaded to the POS for it to work.
In Norway about 80% of the POS terminals have support for NFC payment, however all the retailers have disabled them.
The reason is that we have a national debit card system that is paid for by the banks (and indirectly the consumers) and not the merchants.
Enabling the NFC payments would result in them having to pay surcharge on most transactions.
The terminals do support credit cards but almost everyone use the national system called BankAxept.
There are some national NFC providers on the way from the banking groups, but I think it's really stupid to develop something that only works locally.
Retailers don't support it because, like it or not, almost no one is trying to use it. And it isn't just the US, up here is Canada it is even worse I am betting. And honestly, I can understand this perfectly. I have a VISA card with chip-and-pin and contactless that I can use nearly anywhere in the world and it has a plethora of benefits that I don't get with Apple/Google payments.
Heck, Kroger has new terminals that should support contactless payments AND chip based payments, but neither work. Same with my liquor store. Same with IKEA. At IKEA the terminal has a card slot but also has a note taped to it saying "please swipe". At the other two the slot simply does nothing.
But it's more fun to blame Apple and "apathy" than how broken payments are in the US.