Todays rant.

Touch payment, supposed to be quicket that cash right? So why does it take extra till button presses (an extra 19 in our works canteen.... yes I counted) and then why the hell do I need a printed recipt?

Some stores are worse than others. Tesco is amongst the best but I still get a paper receipt. Sainsburys is about 10 years away from such advances and mosts smaller shops offer touch pay but again in an implementation that makes it far slower than chip and pin.

If the high street wants to keerp trading then it needs to sort this out. Online is so much easier, you pay instantly and get a receipt as an email straight away.

And loyalty cards.... why can i not just just refernce my paymnet card against their loyalty card and dispence with the extra plastic.

The wallet function in Crapple pay is progress (although as usual Sainsburys refuse to accept a picture of their crappy nectar card) but it should not be needed.

I thank you.

I use touch and pay all the time and find it quite easy ..don't know about the bigger supermarkets but Aldi and Lidl seem to have it ok ..as to your point with loyalty cards,Nectar for instance, gives you a couple of key ring ones as well as the main one,what would you do if someone nicked yours. when I go on the tube I prefer the Oyster card as I don't have to have my debit card out and available..

Alas that is Sainsbury's decision. Tesco were going to be worse but thankfully changed their mind.

It is very much within Sainsbury's power to bring Nectar to Apple Pay so a payment would auto credit to your account. Though its not done via the charged card number as that is not disclosed to the merchant

I detest contactless payments. I may be approaching senility, but I am not yet of an age where five seconds to make a payment impacts on my life.

I want to know that I am making a payment; preferably by cash leaving a wallet but otherwise by sticking the numbers in. I don't want tracking for every transaction, and I note that things that make things easy to pay make things very easy to pay without noticing that you're paying... great for the retailer, not so great for me.

I required my bank to supply cards with contactless not installed.

(I currently work on increasing the range from which such systems can read the sensors... it's more than you'd think.)

John will now tell me I'm an old fart.

Find it good at most places especially Aldi co-op and a few pubs also really good for the underground if you have no Oyster card but there are a few places where you seem to have to wait a while for the receipt to print although as said not that I actually want a receipt!
Only issue is I sometimes cannot get the iPhone payment option to pop up on first attempt!
Electronic receipts are the way forward for sure just a shame you don't get an image of the actual paper receipt too
On the whole it's fine but does need some tinkering to improve it

New get rich quick scheme then Neil? Be careful at Stanford hall guys!
Probably why the apple pay system is more secure as you have to activate it you old.... Nah I will leave it for John!

I love contactless payment - it's brilliant and I get fed up now already if it isn't available.

I still pay with folding paper and pieces of metal with some elderly lady's face on them.

I think I got used to Amsterdam where quite a few places no longer take cash at all.

They don't take cash, they don't get my custom.

At some restaurants, you might not find out until you've eaten...

Two miles?

Same here. My bank refused to supply me non-contactless cards so I've resorted to cutting the antenna within the card to disable the contactless feature.

When the contactless cards were first issued by my bank I argued with them for about 10 mins about the lack of security and they just bulshitted about how secure a system it was, until I finally asked why the transaction limit was only £20 if it's a secure system and they gave up at that point.

The contactless cards can be read from upto 3m away, see :

http://2d-code.co.uk/images/pdf/eavesdropping-nfc-contactless-payments.pdf

Personally I only ever use cash in person and cards for online stuff only.

If your card gets skimmed, the bank is responsible. If your wallet gets lifted, you lose your cash.

I've yet to hear of anyone having their contactless card skimmed. After all, there are much easier ways to make money.

Cash is stupid stuff and tons of the stuff gets shipped about every day just to circulate it back from businesses to consumers.

And I have had my wallet lifted once in nearly sixty years...

In concept, Rich, you're spot on: money is only a method of moving obligations and promises from one place to another and there's no reason why it has to have a physical embodiment. However, what is missing from the equation is the physical feedback, no reminder of what has been spent or what is remaining.

Consider for example your contactless card/phone carelessly left in a pub. You use it three times for a tenner, and some miscreant uses it twice. Now prove that the two payments weren't you...

The same example goes for leaving your wallet in the pub - I don't see the difference. Except you can stop your card at any moment. And, though I've not looked at it for my UK cards, my Dutch card spending showed up in almost real time on my app - to the point (being Dutch) that you could even use the app to "Go Dutch" and split the bill between friends. The app also allowed you to manage the spend limit on the card.

With ApplePay you need to unlock the phone to use it (finger print most likely).

I really don't see the downside - we can't move that way fast enough in my opinion. There's still a place for cash but it's great to be liberated from it. Carrying around chunks of metal in your pocket is going to seem really quaint.

Contactless is great but could be so much better. Implemented correctly it is far safer than cash or cards. Just wish retailers would see this.

A good example is Tesco. I pay, using my phone and fingerprint. No unlocking phone, no pin entering. I leave the store and get a message telling me what I have spent. If that message was also a receipt it would be perfect.

It's two factor Authentication, way more secure then cards or cash. Would also kill money laundering.

Almost forgot........ Neal, you're an old fart.

However I will concede that Contactless cards are not the way forward. They will die very quickly though, way too much risk on the retailer.

I might be an old fart, but I can still spell my name!

I like contactless. It's convenient for my spending habits and I don't see it as being higher risk than a card with a magnetic strip/chip or cash.

If it were an option, I would increase my contactless limit.

For me though, Apple Pay (or Android equivalent) is the future. If every retailer offered it and there was no spending limit I would ditch my wallet completely. The only worry would be making sure you were never far from a charger but with wireless chargers starting to appear in cars this won't be a problem for long.

I've also been following the progress of this for a while - Plastc

At the moment, they don't have agreements in the UK for chip and pin use or for contactless but once they sort this out I think it could be a great product.

My last job I got paid monthly by a cashable cheque and i never needed to nor wanted to pay it into a bank. It was actually great walking around with a huge wadge of cash again. I rediscovered how easy it is to bribe people or get a better service when you have cash in your wallet and they can see the reddies in your hand.

You just cant do that with plastic or your phone?

I do not want cash to dissapear by any stretch of the imagination. The ability to conduct transactions without it being monitored, reportable, logged etc is something I would not want to be removed.

Contactless cards I am not a massive fan of, from a tech point of view.

Apple Pay or any suitably secure token based system. Key point being security of the transaction and equally as important, security of your personal data within it. Is very useful. No skimming is possible.

Well, on the reverse side of this argument, I dropped by my local village shop/PO and picked up a few bits. Went to pay the £4.95 by debit card and was told, unless I bought £10 or more stuff, I'd be charged 50p for the transaction. The other choice I was given was to go to the PO counter, draw cash for free, then pay by cash. What's that all about in this day-and-age? I can pay for my large latte at work with contactless payment with no additional charge. I can pay at the supermarket etc with no charge - why this?

I believe that all retailers are charged a fee/percentage by banks for taking card payments. Larger companies swallow the cost whereas smaller ones can't/won't.

I've had this before. Do they really think people are going to faff about getting cash out just to save them a few pence? Of course not, they'll just go to a different shop.

Provided it's not out of the way or inconvenient. If you're already at the shop when you find out there's a charge, it's probably more cost effective to pay it than find an alternative.

If you spend more than 9 minutes of your time trying to save a pound then you're working for less than minimum wage (credit to XKCD).

That makes a bit of a number nonsense of these contactless payment systems aimed at smaller purchases. It also rather flies in the face of NL's move to a cashless society where many small places now refuse cash - partly on the grounds that it's expensive to manage.

I'm already paying far more for things at my local shop than I'm paying at my (almost as convenient) supermarket. I can't say I'll be making a habit of shopping there.