With the recent news of CVS and Rite-Aid backing out of the NFC payment game (temporarily, at least), I found myself looking for a new drugstore/NFC payment combination. I enjoyed going to CVS and paying with AMEX Serve through Softcard -- you could go to the back of the store and pay when picking up a prescription, and then pay again with the rest of your items in the front, and each transaction would net you an extra dollar in cash back on your Serve account.

Today I happened to be swinging by a new Walgreen's that had opened up near my in-laws, and figured this would be an excellent opportunity to test out Google Wallet and Walgreen's terminals simultaneously. On first blush, the equipment at this new Walgreen's was very nice, with new registers and bright beautiful touchscreens. It certainly didn't hurt that each of these touchscreens had small icons at the bottom that cycled through the Apple Pay and Google Wallet icons -- always a good sign.

When the items were done being rung up, I simply opened the Google Wallet app with the PIN code, and held the phone up do the terminal. PRO TIP #1: Wait for all four lights to light up before removing your phone. I was a bit jittery the first time trying to run the transaction, and pulled my phone away after only the first two lights came on. This caused the app to kill the transaction, and display an error message. Here, I hit the back button, held my phone back up to the terminal, waited for all four lights to turn on this time, and the transaction initiated.

This leads to PRO TIP #2: I had my Google Wallet set to use an AMEX card, but the Walgreen's terminal asked for a debit PIN code. Simply hit the "Credit" button on the bottom left of the touchscreen, and the transaction will complete as expected.

And that was it! The cashier was very friendly and not shocked that someone would try this -- although I'm fairly certain she hadn't seen it run before. Leads me to believe they were educated on the possibility, but it's not being frequently used at that location - yet.

Oh, and two for two so far using Google Wallet for my NFC payments. I was thinking I would have some growing pains switching from Softcard, but so far so good.