Popular home improvement retailer Home Depot and Texas-based grocery chain H-E-B have finally given in and will soon be accepting Apple Pay and other tap-to-pay payment methods in their U.S. stores. Both store have been long-term holdouts when it came to accepting Apple’s popular form of contactless payment.
A photo shared by the blog Appleosophy shows a Home Depot checkout with the ever popular “tap, insert, or swipe” directions found on payment terminals that accept contactless payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
This has been confirmed to us thanks to a source who provided a photo of the checkout at their nearby Home Depot store where the card reader does mention the word “tap” on it and the Near Field Communications (NFC) icon also appears on said card reader with the green light on it glowing.
The home improvement giant has yet to officially announce that it accepts Apple Pay, so none of us will know for sure whether our local Home Depot is accepting it until we give it a try.
In a social media post earlier this year, the company said it while it was “evaluating a number of new payment methods, including a number of mobile payments,” it hadn’t made any “permanent decisions.”
Home Depot had previously accepted Apple Pay in the payment system’s early days, although it dropped support for the service in 2015.
Another long-time holdout was Texas-based grocery store chain H-E-B, which announced in a press release this week that it is rolling out the ability to pay using Apple Pay and other tap-to-pay methods at all of its stores throughout October.
“At H-E-B, we’re always exploring a broad range of technologies to enhance how customers shop and pay for products,” said Ashwin Nathan, H-E-B Group Vice President of Marketing and Payments. “This has been one of the most requested services we have received from our customers and Partners, and we are excited to now make this popular technology available at all our H-E-B locations.”
The company also owns two other market other chains, Central Market and Joe V’s Smart Shop, which began accepting Apple Pay earlier this year.
Walmart is now one of the only major retailers in the U.S. that still does not accept Apple Pay. In April 2023, another long-time holdout, national supermarket chain Kroger began accepting Apple Pay in its Kentucky and Ohio stores. While Kroger hasn’t made any official announcements about accepting Apple Pay, I can testify that the chain accepts it in at least one Tennessee location, as I paid for my groceries using Apple Pay.
Some Kroger-owned stores had already begun accepting Apple Pay at some of their locations a few years previously, including California grocer Ralphs, QFC in Washington and Oregon, King Soopers stores in Colorado and Wyoming, and Fred Meyer stores in the Northwest.