Apple Pay might get a lift from Starbucks Corp, among other other restaurant chains.
On Thursday, Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said some Starbucks stores would accept Apple Pay, a mobile payments system, this year as part of a pilot program.
Bailey made the announcement at the Code Mobile conference, a tech industry event, where she added that all Starbucks stores would accept Apple Pay sometime next year. Restaurant chains KFC and Chili’s plan to adopt Apple Pay as well. Apple Inc is helping quick-service restaurants like KFC, which “have a need for fast payments,” Bailey said.
The adoption of Apple Pay by the restaurant chains is the latest sign of the growth of the mobile payments system, which has been gaining partners as diverse as JetBlue and Rite Aid. Some of the retailers that use Apple Pay had earlier declined to work with the system.
Apple introduced Apple Pay in September last year. The system lets users pay for goods by holding their iPhone or Apple Watch near a credit card reader. Apple Pay works with the credit, debit, store and loyalty cards that users have stored in their Passbook app.
In a statement, Starbucks said it would test Apple in some stores by year’s end before rolling the service out next year in 7,500 stores.
“We have been accepting Apple Pay in the UK over the past few months, and it has been received well by customers,” Starbucks said.
Even though Apple Pay is still a tiny portion of Apple’s overall revenue stream, Bailey said that she had seen “a sea change in acceptance at the merchant level,” emphasizing that more businesses, including small and midsize ones, are adopting the technology necessary to accept payment methods like Apple Pay.
Whether Apple can use mobile payments to lock people into its product ecosystem remains to be seen. The number of people who use devices for mobile payments is growing fast, but it is still tiny.
Research firm EMarketer said that there were 15.9 million mobile payment users in the US last year and that it expected that number to jump by 42 percent, to 22.6 million, this year.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) today unveiled a long-haul network expansion plan at a shareholders’ meeting in Taipei, including direct flights to Barcelona, Spain, and Zurich, Switzerland, as well as a service connecting Taipei, Sydney and New Zealand. Starlux is to become the first Taiwanese carrier to offer non-stop services to the two European cities, while the inaugural oceanic route is expected to expand transit opportunities within the Australia-New Zealand market, Starlux said. Flight services to Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York are under evaluation, the airline added. Prior to the shareholders’ meeting, the airline earlier this year announced that it would be
Taiwanese prosecutors suspect that three people successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia Corp artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer Inc servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the US has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked Taiwan’s first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the US to take a more active role in curtailing
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) employee bonuses are likely to grow more than 30 percent this year, in line with the past few years as the company’s profits continue to set new records, an anonymous source cited TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) as saying yesterday. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is committed to taking care of its workers, the source said, citing Wei’s meeting with employees yesterday morning. Wei also expressed gratitude to employees for their contribution to the company’s improving bottom line, the source added. Since 2023, TSMC’s employee bonuses have grown at an annual rate of
RSS