Walmart will begin switching on contactless payments at chosen stores and clubs on 24 August, the company announced on Friday, with every US location covered by the end of the year and fuel stations following by mid-2027. As The Verge notes, that makes it one of the last major US retailers to switch on a payment method the rest of the country adopted years ago.
The supported methods go beyond the phone wallets: contactless credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, payment-enabled smartwatches, and contactless EBT cards are all on the list.
The schedule leaked before the first register flipped
Hours after the announcement, 9to5Mac obtained the internal rollout plan sent to store management, and it's a state-by-state march. Arkansas, home of Walmart's Bentonville headquarters, goes first on 24 August. The West Coast follows on 10 September, Texas on 17 September, and the rollout finishes with Pennsylvania, New York and the rest of the Northeast on 12 October.
Missouri appears nowhere on the list. The memo doesn't say why, and the company hasn't explained. It's the kind of gap you only notice because somebody published the entire document.
A decade of resistance, briefly retold
The refusal was never technical. Walmart wanted customers in its own payment rails, where the data and the relationship stayed in Bentonville. It helped back CurrentC, the retailer consortium's attempt to build an alternative to Apple Pay, which shut down in 2016. Then came Walmart Pay, a QR-code system that asks you to open the Walmart app at checkout, which the company was still defending to MacRumors as recently as last year.
Meanwhile, phone wallets reached 85 percent of American retailers. A company that measures every competitive metric in shopping watched that figure climb for ten years and kept the registers locked anyway.
What to watch: whether Walmart Pay survives contact
The announcement is careful to frame contactless as an addition, sitting beside cash, cards and the store's own app. That's the language companies use in the year before quietly retiring whatever they're defending. Walmart Pay survives this quarter, but a method requiring a specific app and a QR code is about to sit beside one that needs your phone held near a reader for half a second.
For everyone who has asked a cashier about Apple Pay since 2014, the answer changes on Monday. In Arkansas. Everyone else's queue keeps waiting into October.