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GeekWire Staff Writer Taylor Soper checks out using Apple Pay at Chevron.

In a move that’s tailor-made to spite consumers who want to give them money, Rite Aid and CVS have switched off their NFC payment terminals to stop people from using Apple Pay or Google Wallet, according to a report from MacRumors. The move comes less than a week after Apple launched the new payments technology, which allows iPhone 6 users to pay for goods with just their phone.

While Apple has partnered with particular companies like Whole Foods and McDonalds to ensure that its system works at those retailers at launch, Apple Pay is designed to work with any NFC-equipped point-of-sale system right out of the box, which is how people were able to buy their prescriptions at CVS without pulling out their wallet.

screen322x572The reason the two companies killed NFC payments is because they’re a part of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a consortium of merchants led by Walmart that has teamed up to create its own mobile payment system. It’s called CurrentC, and won’t be available until 2015. CurrentC is designed to side-step credit card fees, which take a small percentage off the top of every transaction a merchant makes.

The CurrentC system is currently in beta testing, and it’s a completely different take on mobile payments from Apple Pay. At its core, CurrentC requires cashiers and customers to use QR codes to transfer money directly from a user’s bank account, according to TechCrunch. The app either creates a code on a user’s smartphone or requires the user to take a photo of a code displayed by the cashier in order to make the transfer.

By all accounts, CurrentC is everything Apple Pay is not: inconvenient, less secure, and more invasive. Because it uses Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers to get around credit card fees, users who want to connect their bank account will have to verify their identity with their driver’s license number and Social Security number.

What’s more, the system collects loads of data on a user’s purchasing habits – some of it opt-in and some of it not – including health data. That can then be used for serving ads and pushing promotions based on someone’s habits. Of course, this tracking is already par for the course at a lot of retailers, with the use of loyalty cards and other markers.

But compare that to Apple Pay, which just requires that people enter their credit card info, and works as soon as a phone is in range of a NFC-enabled payment terminal. The system is specifically designed to prevent tracking: retailers only get a one-time token, and Apple doesn’t trace purchases across its network.

As other commentators pointed out, it looks like CurrentC’s design stems from retailers solving their problems with credit card fees, while paying only nominal attention to customer experience.

This has already prompted an angry response from the internet. Reviews of the CurrentC app on the iOS App Store have turned sour, and communities of iPhone and Android users on Reddit are teaming up for a boycott of those stores that are using the system.

That doesn’t mean it’s curtains for CurrentC just yet. Retailers may offer people who use the app discounts for paying with CurrentC, which could draw bargain-conscious consumers to the solution. CurrentC’s use of QR codes also means that it can work with a wider range of smartphones, especially lower-end models that don’t have NFC chips in them.

But it’ll be a while before we know whether CurrentC will succeed, since it’s still months away from launching.

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