In the near future no one at Aeropostale or Foot Locker will need to fuss with filthy, disgusting credit and debit cards when they wish to purchase clothing and footwear — they will be able to simply tap their phones to a point-of-sale terminal. ISIS has released a list of its partner merchants, both nationwide and in two test markets — Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City.

ISIS, the mobile wallet application supported by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, promises to “fundamentally transform how people shop, pay and save” by allowing users to tap their phones rather than swipe a card when they pay for something cashlessly.
One of the hurdles to transforming the way we shop, of course, is merchant adoption. ISIS can have as many users as there are smartphone-havers on the planet, but it will be utterly meaningless if they cannot tap their phones when they wish to part ways with their money. To avoid this, ISIS will need merchant partners — and now it has them.
Among the nationwide partners ISIS announced Wednesday are well-known brands like Coca-Cola, Champs Sports, Aeropostale, Foot Locker, Jamba Juice, Dillard’s and Macy’s. On top of this, ISIS has announced partnerships with local businesses in Salt Lake City and Austin that include local sports franchises and stadiums, local retailers and local restaurants and cafes.
“By systematically building out merchant acceptance in an approach that is both geographically focused and centered around everyday spending, ISIS intends to create a comprehensive mobile commerce experience for consumers that will simultaneously benefit merchants of all sizes,” said Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group, in prepared remarks.
Of course, ISIS does not exist solely to make point-of-sale transactions more frictionless, it also seeks to create a platform for merchant and location-based deals. It has been difficult for local merchants to make smartphones work to their benefit — frequently consumers use them to comparison shop on the web while in physical stores, much to the detriment of physical retailers’ bottom line. With a more robust mobile wallet user base, physical retail can, in theory, take advantage of its locality by pinging consumers with special offers when they’re nearby.
In prepared remarks, Jim Stapleton, chief sales officer of ISIS, described the product as “a mobile commerce experience that transforms how consumers shop and interact with their favorite brands.”
High hopes (and presumably a few careers) are riding on the success of the mobile wallet. Finally, it seems that we will be able to see if ISIS can do all it promises to.

At my parents’ house in San Francisco, I’m just literally two blocks from the businesses that provided me my first high school jobs: the bagel shop, which has changed hands and name by now, and the smoothie shop, which is long out of business (in fact, that was the first job I was ever laid off from). If I go further afield, to downtown San Francisco, I can visit the themed diner that gave me my first gig waiting tables on summers home from college. Unlike at Manhattan Bagel and Juice It!, however, I’d likely encounter plenty of familiar faces at Mel’s if I were to swing by. Restaurant work has a way of sinking its claws into you. In my case, it very nearly did, at the expense of a more interesting career. 

If I have any regrets about waiting tables over the summers during college it certainly has nothing to do with the shoeboxes full of cash I would periodically walk down to my local Bank of America branch. In fact, I may have no regrets at all. What I didn’t know as I did it, however, is that this easy money, combined with a recession, would put me in career limbo for years out of college. Whether I can directly correlate my college choices with my career trajectory is beside the point: this is ultimately the decision college students must consider toward the end of the schoolyear. Do I take an internship and advance my career or make money so that my life is less miserable during the schoolyear?
My incredibly helpful answer: it depends. And in fact, it might not matter.
As a college student, I had a clear sense of what I did and did not like, but I didn’t have a good sense of what I thought I would be doing with myself. I knew that I hated being broke during the schoolyear, and so my decision was clear: make as much money as I can, live at my parents’ house, and enjoy life a little more. I met some great people, and I met some scumbags. I had coworkers from all corners of the globe — Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, some unpronounceable autonomous Muslim region in Southwestern Russia that is not Chechnya, the list goes on — and I waited on people from all parts of the country and the world, all coming to Mel’s for the faux-Americana and overpiced garbage it had on offer.
I worked the overnight shift, and got a good look at what all of us look like when we get food after the bars — absolutely digusting and despicable — and took the bus home as the streetlights turned off for the day, my pockets full of cash. The restaurant seemed cursed at times. One of our waiters got murdered in Oakland, I’m told; another, who got arrested at work by a small squadron of SFPD officers and detectives under mysterious circumstances, eventually died in a motorcycle accident — but not before getting one of the waitresses pregnant. It was, to say the least, an interesting job. Getting paid mostly in singles had the effect of making dollars feel like Monopoly money, but that, too, was worth it. I was too young to go out to bars anyway. And this is how I funded my lifestyle in college, along with a part-time job on campus.
Then I graduated, and ended up moving across the country and earning the vast majority of my income for the next few years…waiting tables. Is this because I didn’t pursue more high-minded work during the summertime? Perhaps. I graduated with just two short-term internships under my belt — one at a real-estate firm and one at a non-profit advocacy group — and I don’t need to tell you how much white space that left on my resume. Had I known what I wanted to do with myself immediately after college, this very well may have prevented me from being able to do that. But I didn’t.
In fact, had I not waited tables in college, I wouldn’t have lasted one full year here in New York in 2008 — arguably the worst time in modern memory to move here without a job or really any skills besides a college degree. And in the absence of other opportunities that I knew how to find, what I did during summers in college became my sole source of income. I made more money than my girlfriend did at her real career-oriented job, and I only had to work a few nights a week. Waiting tables is lucrative work in New York, but it’s stupid. I hated it, and hated myself for inadvertently benefitting more from my college summers than from college itself.
I would read New York Times stories about college grads living at home with their parents, and how tragic it was for both the economy and these youngsters’ lives, and I would wonder: what do the editors at the New York Times think of people like me? Graduating from college doesn’t necessarily mean either a.) a job at an insurance company or b.) living in your parents’ basement. If you learn how to earn money for yourself without a college degree while you go to college, graduating from school doesn’t introduce this false binary to your life.
But this hatred for my line of work inspired me to seek out opportunities to write more, and then an internship at a magazine, which turned into a part-time job at a magazine, and after a while I seem to have found something like the beginnings of a career writing — something I had no idea I could or would do while I was in college. It required weekly trips to Philadelphia on early morning Chinatown buses for months, and long stretches of time with no time off at all between my paying work and my free work. It wasn’t that hard, but it was certainly harder than college. I had finally found something I would really exert myself for, and it helped me throw off the inertia that easy money can provide.
If there’s anything to be gleaned from my story — it’s entirely possible that there is not — it’s this: summer internships are great for people who know at 20 years of age what sort of career they would like to have. I wasn’t one of these people, but I also value my independence — perhaps too much. In any event, a career does not necessarily equate to independence. In a down economy, being too focused on landing a career-oriented job can land you right back in your parents’ basement. It’s worthwhile to be able to do things other than think critically, which is all a liberal arts degree is good for. It’s a gamble, sure, but your college degree isn’t worthless without summer internships, and you can still do them during the schoolyear or after you graduate. It will require swallowing your pride — and flouting federal labor laws! — but it’s probably better than living with mom and dad, hitting them up for gas money.

Combine an election year, a highly disputed and complex regulatory law, a massive and freaky trading loss by a respected bank, and a multimillionaire Republican candidate, and you get a delicious stew of overly politicized regulatory arcania. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reports that the White House is pushing for a tougher version of the Volcker rule, and that it might have something to do with November.

The Journalreports that President Obama’s financial team from his election campaign is interested in toughening up the Volcker rule — the part of the Dodd-Frank Act that puts limits on the amount of risk that depository institutions can take on in financial markets. Though it is not yet in effect, and won’t be until July, the rule’s efficacy has come into question in the aftermath of JP Morgan Chase’s “London Whale” trading loss.
The fear is that banks, which are essentially governmentally-backstopped due to the implicit understanding that they are too big for the government to allow them to fail, will be able to continue to make risky bets. It’s still unclear whether JPM’s trade was a hedge to offset risk or a bet to increase revenue, but some think it was the latter disguised as the former. This, critics say, is the gaping loophole in the Volcker rule: that banks can continue to make risky bets with an implicit guarantee from American taxpayers, while telling regulators that they are merely hedging, or being market-makers.
From the Journal:
In this year’s election, the president’s advisers want to champion tougher Wall Street regulations passed in 2010, and worry the argument could be diminished if elements of the law—including the “Volcker rule” restricting speculative investments by banks—end up looking weak.
It doesn’t hurt that his political opponent, Mitt Romney, has millions of dollars and opposes Dodd-Frank.
So this could be the way that the Volcker rule gets toughened: purely as an election year ploy to make the President’s opponent look like an out-of-touch rich guy (which, well, he is). Is it too much to ask for a Washington that might regulate for regulation’s sake? Not as a cheap political tool to trot out during an election year?
After all, a market collapse can happen at any time, not just around the election cycle.

PayPal has largely been a cashless operation, until now. Through a partnership with coin-counting machine provider Coinstar, PayPal transforms Coinstar kiosks into machines that also double as ATMs for PayPal customers.

In 2011, PayPal piloted these kiosks in local grocery chains in Dallas, Texas to test another way for customers to fund and withdraw from their accounts.
“The results have been impressive. We’ve found that 40 percent of our testers go back to use PayPal at Coinstar machines again and through survey research, we’re getting high marks from our users on the integration,” said Dan Schatt, head of financial innovations at PayPal, in a recent blog post.
Using the Coinstar kiosks, PayPal customers just enter their email or mobile number before proceeding to load their accounts with cash or coins. There is a cash-loading fee of $3 per transaction and coin-loading fee of 5.9% of the amount loaded.
Also, PayPal users can withdraw cash, at $3 per transaction, by entering their email password or mobile number-PIN credentials.
“We’re making money work better in today’s multi-channel shopping environment,” Schatt said.
PayPal users typically have to move funds through external bank accounts. There is also the option of spending funds through a PayPal debit card.
Regular Coinstar machines count coins and consumers can opt to cash out through e-certificates and gift cards at popular retailers, which is free of charge, or through a cash voucher to be redeemed as cash or used toward a purchase at the store’s checkout, which comes with a 9.8% fee.
Coinstar currently operates more than 19,000 coin-counting kiosks in supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, restaurants and financial institutions. PayPal has 110 million active registered accounts worldwide.
Despite the wide reach held by both companies, the PayPal-integrated Coinstar kiosks will only be available in Dallas, for now.
“We have no additional rollout plans to announce at this time,” said Schatt in an emailed statement.
Would you use this new service?