Apple Pay Coming to Target, Taco Bell and More US Retail Stores

With the introduction of several new major retail chains, Apple has announced that its mobile payment platform is now available at 74 of the top 100 merchants in the U.S. and 65 percent of all retail locations across the country.

In a news release today, Apple announced that Target, Taco Bell, Hy-Vee supermarkets, Speedway convenience stores, and Jack in the Box have now come on board with Apple Pay, although the actual rollout to retail stores is still ongoing.

The rollout at Target has already begun, and Apple Pay is expected to be available at all 1,850 locations in the coming weeks. Hy-Vee and Speedway have already completed their deployment of Apple Pay, while Taco Bell and Jack in the are expected to have the mobile payment service available at all of their locations over the course of the next few months.

Apple Pay has continued to expand throughout the U.S., with Costco competing its rollout to over 500 warehouse stores last summer, CVS Pharmacy introducing it across all of its 8,400 standalone locations, and 7-Eleven launching the service at 95 percent of its U.S. stores last year.

While contactless payment terminals are almost ubiquitous in Canada, Australia, and many European countries, where the technology has been incorporated into physical credit and debit cards for years, the U.S. retail and banking industry had not widely adopted contactless payments prior to the advent of Apple Pay — only two percent of U.S. retailers supported any kind of contactless payments when Apple unveiled the service four years ago. As a result, U.S. retailers have had to upgrade equipment and payment systems in order to support the new technology, making the wider deployment of Apple Pay within the U.S. a significant indicator of the popularity and influence of Apple’s mobile payment platform.