PHILADELPHIA -- Buying gasoline, hoagies, movie tickets and convenience items got a few seconds faster yesterday for busy consumers in several markets on the East Coast.
Chase Bank activated its "contactless" credit-card system in the Philadelphia and greater New York City tri-state area, including New Jersey and Connecticut. The rollout includes about 1,200 Philadelphia-area locations, such as Wawa, 7-Eleven and CVS stores and Regal and AMC movie theaters.
With the bank's "blink" system, a shopper simply holds her card [image-nocss] within two inches of a radio-frequency reader to pay for purchases at the register. The reader flashes green almost instantly and beeps to signal that the charge was made.
"Everything is about speed and simplification. Everyone is so time-starved," Howard Stoeckel, Wawa's chief executive officer, said after a demonstration of the new payment method this week at Wawa in Glen Mills, Delaware County, according to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Wawa recently installed readers for the new cards at all of its 540 convenience stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia to give shoppers faster service at the checkout and gasoline pump, enabling stores to serve more customers, Stoeckel said.
The blink card looks like a regular credit card, with the exception of the blink icon on the face and the inclusion of a microchip with an antenna inside. Chase Bank USA, a Wilmington division of JPMorgan Chase & Co., this week is mailing 900,000 blink-equipped cards to its existing MasterCard and Visa customers in the Philadelphia region.
The new cards can cut the time it takes to pay for purchases by 20% to 30%, said Thomas J. O'Donnell, senior vice president of marketing for Chase Card Services.
Unlike Exxon Mobil Corp.'s Speedpass, which was launched in 1997 and can be used only at that company's gasoline stations, blink is an open technology that can be used at any store equipped with a reader.
The readers at Wawa, which is launching a Wawa Rewards Visa card with blink next month, accept payments by all three contactless systems. Sheetz Inc., Altoona, Pa., started accepting contactless payment in May.
It saves two seconds at the gasoline pump and 13 seconds checking out inside, said Rich Steckroth, manager of new business development for Sheetz. "It really does add up."
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