Yea I realized that when I was thinking about it. Which is a financial smart reason, but in the end it limits them.

If I only have my phone which I have android pay on and I need to get something from a drug store, I would go to CVS but they don't accept NFC. So I will have to go to Walgreen's instead which is usually near a CVS. So I don't get why they don't offer NFC, because keeping 98% of the transaction amount is better than 0.

Because what you're saying won't happen in a lot of situations. Drugs stores are interchangeable, but Target and Walmart are much less so, particularly out of urban centres.

Yea that is true, I totally forgot about towns where Walmart is the only store.

If your margin is only a few percent, 2% is a big deal.

What matters to a retailer isn't the revenue, it's the difference between costs and revenue.

Walmart is also smart about this. They algorithmically determine how many cashiers to have at certain times of the day, under the assumption that even though some people may give up and leave instead of waiting in line, its still more profitable for that to occur than to staff more cashiers for everyone to complete their purchases in a timely manner.

In the real world, its about profits, not volume.

Good point, with Walmart they will generate revenue no matter what, but to cut cost it makes sense to use it.

They also get to offload the burden of paying for fraudulent transactions onto the user.

Isn't this the entire point of the exercise? It certainly doesn't seem to be about consumers.