When Apple Pay first rolled out, it was possible to use it at CVS and Rite Aid, among others. A few days later, however, those stores, plus some other retailers, turned off their scanners as part of a Walmart-led consortium called Merchant Customer Exchange that uses QR codes instead of NFC.
Boycotting Apple Pay seems like a bad idea; those QR codes are fairly easy to hack; the Chinese central Bank ordered Alipay to stop using the tech after hackers started putting malicious Trojan horses into the codes. MCX developed an app for user on smartphones, called CurrentC; John Gruber from Daring Fireball says it’s not likely that the app “will ever gain any traction whatsoever.” In fact, the app is meant to do an end-run around the credit card companies. According to former Walmart CEO Lee Scott, “I don’t know that MCX will succeed and I don’t care. As long as Visa suffers.”