Lately Apple has been doing a little puffing about the adoption and general success of Apple Pay. The advantages of Apple pay in my mind are primarily security. Apple Pay generates a unique number with each transaction. That way vendors don't have to store my data and can't cough it up to Cirks. It drives me nuts every time I hand a waiter my credit card and watch him walk away with it. Likewise when I visit a retail store that famously had a massive credit card breach just last year yet still has no alternative to scanning my new credit card number for their leaky computers, I want to throw things.

There now 1,000 Apple Pay issuers (mostly banks) and a reported 2 million retail locations where you can use Apple Pay to buy stuff. While those numbers are impressive, it feels like there is a lot of work left to do. I live in Orange County California, a place ripe with conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, there are very few locations where I can use Apple Pay to buy stuff. This is probably more an indictment of alternative payment methods in general in America then Apple Pay itself but, nevertheless, it's disappointing that this technology is now several years old and the only places I routinely shop that accept Apple Pay are a hipster super-market and the Apple Store. I hope that by the end of 2016 that changes.