but the mom-and-pop shops and family restaurants that dominate the cityscape rarely had point-of-sale (POS) devices for processing plastic cards. The owners of those shops did, however, have smartphones. So China’s internet juggernauts turned those phones into mobile portals for payments. The idea was simple, but the speed of execution, impact on consumer behavior, and resulting data have been astonishing. During 2015 and 2016, Tencent and Alipay gradually introduced the ability to pay at shops by simply scanning a QR code—basically a square bar code for phones—within the app. It’s a
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