[floatingatoll]

CVS Pharmacy recently gave up on a years-long initiative to convince Americans to pay with QR codes. It seems market-appropriate, in light of that total failure, to have reservations about adding camera hardware to a cash register.

[dawhizkid]

AFAIK Starbucks' own app represents a sizable percentage of mobile payments in the U.S. and is QR-code based. I don't think Square should take cues from one random merchant's failure with QR-code payments to decide whether or not it will take off in the future. Also I assume Square has ambitions to expand globally and in doing needs to shake off a western bias when it comes to payments.

[floatingatoll]

CVS just paid $69 billion dollars to buy a health insurer. Calling them a “random merchant” considerably underestimates both their leverage over, and in general their relevance to, the payment processing industry.

EDIT:

Square’s 2017Q4 net revenue is about $600 million dollars, CVS’s 2017Q4 net revenue is about $48 billion dollars. Assuming the retail 2.5% transaction fee, CVS paid $1.2 billion dollars of credit card fees in 2017Q4, approximately double Square’s total revenue for that period.

Square would be very wise to take note of CVS’s failure in the QRcode payment app market, given that CVS generates twice their total net revenue in processing fees alone.

[dawhizkid]

CVS’s main business is not their retail business but their Pharmacy Benefit Manager biz which they share a duopoly for, which is a b2b business and nothing to do with the CVS you or I see. To take 2.5% of their revenue and assume it’s all consumer retail transactions is just completely wrong.

[tdeck]

Before that Square had a consumer payment solution (Square Wallet) using QR codes at Starbucks. It was supported at every starbucks location but never saw enough consumer adoption. They really tried, really. Really.