An RBTE/Essential Retail employee, writes an anonymous open letter to Sainsbury’s to enquire about the retailer’s snail-pace when it comes to contactless.

Dear Sainsbury’s

As a loyal(ish) shopper at your establishment, I feel compelled to write to you and ask, when the heck are you going to launch contactless in your stores?

I find it incredible that one of the largest grocery retailers in Europe does not have contactless payment facilities, when your competitors do.

You were one of the first to implement self-scan tills in order to speed up the customer journey, and despite wanting to take my own eyes out when I’m told to check for the unidentified item in the bagging area, I quite like them. And having one of our RBTE exhibitors, Ingenico, providing POS at all your pay-points, why don’t you switch the contactless on? Especially at the self scan till which tend to be smaller purchases anyway.

I used to own a coffee bar from 2005-2010, and in that little ol’ local coffee shop, had contactless from around 2009. Seven years ago!

It really is an incredible oversight, Sainsbury’s, because it slows down the whole shopping process. And I am sure it can’t be that much of a deal to change your POS units if you have the technology which already supports contactless – it takes two seconds to change and calibrate one of these units.

I was at a motorway service station on the M3, the other day and a number of retailers – not you, this time Sainsbury’s! – did not have contactless, but instead featured a little tag saying ‘Contactless coming soon…’ on their payment terminals. Rather than designing, printing and sending millions of these tags out to retailers and them attaching them to every machine, surely it would be more time effective to just.. well… SEND THE ACTUAL CONTACTLESS MACHINE?!?!

Apple Pay has been in the UK for a year and people are tapping their phones and debit cards, left, right and centre. I do hope you listen to what your customers are asking for and sort our your machines, sometime soon.

Yours sincerely,

A thoroughly frustrated shopper, with a contactless card burning a hole in my pocket.

*Since this blog went live, Sainsbury’s has contacted us on social media to let us know it hopes to introduce contactless payments in stores later this year. “Keep your eyes peeled,” it said.