When a cluttered counter obstructed cashless payments

Singapore

LAST week, I picked up a bottle of hair conditioner and some mouthwash at a pharmacy. As I waited in line at the cashier, I was pondering the different ways that I could pay for my items - which would cost less than S$10. With only a S$100 note in my wallet and not wanting to deal with change, I decided to go with Apple Pay.

It had always been a simple and elegant solution. All I had to do was to hold my iPhone near a card terminal, rest my thumb on the home button and wait a second for it to confirm my fingerprint and purchase. There was no need to launch Wallet (the app that powers Apple Pay and holds all my debit and credit cards) on my iPhone, or take out my physical wallet at all.

The cashier rang up my purchases quickly. I told her that I would like to pay by Apple Pay. She nodded and pointed to a card reader, and I held my iPhone against it. But nothing happened. My iPhone did not prompt me for my fingerprint like it usually did. So the cashier pushed some buttons on her point of sale (POS) system and asked that I try again. Still, nothing happened.

She was calm, and apologised that this had been happening a lot lately. After a few more tries she turned to a colleague standing next to her for help. Her colleague watched as I placed my iPhone against the card reader, and immediately said: "Aiyo, that's the wrong terminal!"

My cashier gasped. Embarrassed, she scrambled to find the correct card reader, only to discover that it had fallen into a pile of anti-ageing capsule cartons, which were among items that were on offer and were thus placed alongside the POS system at the checkout counter. She swiftly fished the card reader out and restored it. I placed my iPhone against it. This time, it worked.

Oddly, my cashier was not the only one who was embarrassed. I was too. As a frequent user of Apple Pay, I should have realised that it was not the correct card reader. I could only imagine the number of customers who could not use Apple Pay that day because of that slip.

If anything, this incident affirmed two oft-mentioned deterrents to Singapore's pursuit of a cashless society: merchant confusion about e-payment solutions, and the absence of a unified POS terminal (made worse by limited space on a checkout counter). Solving the latter will go a long way in solving the first challenge.

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