Unlike some of my colleagues in the tech media, I don't have any particular beef with Walmart. Yes, they sell cheap imported crap, and yes, they under-pay their employees, stiffing both the people who make stuff and the people who sell stuff. But if you object to that strongly enough to actually change your buying habits, you'll soon run out of places to buy things. I do, however, object to the idea of a mobile payment system that works at exactly one store. That's taking the biggest problem with mobile payments as a whole, the lack of inter-operability, and turning it into a selling point.

And indeed, that's what the ubiquitous American retailer intends to do with Walmart Pay, announced this morning via press release. Walmart Pay will be an extension of the existing Walmart mobile app that allows shoppers to pay via "almost any smartphone" and with "almost any payment type." But the system won't be offered to any other retailers (even those that don't directly compete with Walmart, like, say, McDonalds), so the big blue store is the only place you'll be able to make use of that rather complex system.

To be fair, I'm approaching this from a technology perspective, where inter-operability and ease of use are always desirable. Walmart and its corporate rivals don't particularly care what you or I think - they're probably approaching mobile payments as an extension of their existing services, like those Walmart credit cards that Craig Robinson won't shut up about. So the idea of spending money somewhere that isn't Walmart doesn't really cross their minds. For the sake of completion, I'll mention that the press release says that Walmart is looking into incorporating "other mobile wallets" sometime in the future.

PRESS RELEASE