[lxgr]

I'd be really surprised if 7-Eleven employees used personal or company-provided smartphones to confirm payments.

For most QR payment systems, the flow for smaller merchants is customers scanning a printed QR code (optionally with common amounts pre-populated) and the merchant receiving a notification (so no need to actually open any app to confirm payments, and the merchant app could easily assign different ringtones to different payment amounts). This is the use case in which these speakers make a lot of sense.

But for larger merchants with a POS, the clerk usually scans the customer's (dynamic) QR code and initiates the payment that way. Alternatively, an existing POS payments terminal can display a one-time and transaction-linked code that the customer scans.

For tax and reporting reasons alone, payments practically need to be bound to a given transaction/receipt number.

[HeavyFeather]

> For tax and reporting reasons alone, payments practically need to be bound to a given transaction/receipt number.

Cash doesn't work like that, so some countries might not require this link even for some cashless payments. Heck I receive money transfers in EU and US that don't have any numbers in them, and they're not $2.