Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Sure, big chains very publicly jumped on the Google Wallet bandwagon last summer, and more recently over a dozen have signed on for PayPal’s in-store payment system. But none of the chains has retrained associates to encourage customers to use the alternative payment systems—and almost no customers use the new systems.

It’s the same eerie silence at the POS that followed the introduction of contactless cards: Retailers installed the necessary PIN pads. Banks issued contactless cards. No one encouraged customers or cashiers, who in many cases didn’t even know contactless was a possibility. Result: Contactless was dead in the water.

Compare that to the one retailer that has actually pushed a sort of alternative payment system: Starbucks. Every barista in the chain knows exactly what to do when customers hold up their phones that way. And customers who use the Starbucks app like it. They really like it. They volunteer how much they like it every time they’re asked about Google Wallet or ISIS or PayPal or anything Apple might be thinking about for mobile payments.

None of those options is real to these customers. But the pay-by-mobile with Starbucks? It’s not only real, it’s something they do everyday.

So why hasn’t anyone but Starbucks (and a toe-dipping Burger King) made that effort? Is it because retraining associates, and especially customers, is too difficult and expensive? Yes, because that requires investing real training and marketing dollars. But anyone who wants confirmation of ROI can walk the roughly 150 yards (OK, 175 yards, tops) to the nearest Starbucks.

Is the problem that Google, ISIS and PayPal are really just front-ends for the same old Visa and MasterCard (and the same old interchange)? Then chains will have to reinvent payment themselves—and the people working on the problem probably shouldn’t be treasury types who are only concerned about somehow getting out from under interchange. Remember, every big chain that’s old enough once had its own payment-card operation. Running them wasn’t cheap. Interchange used to be a way for retailers to cut costs.

Is it because developing a new system in-house is too tough a technical problem? That’s hard to believe, in a business where Walmart buys up startups in a steady stream, Kroger has built its own checkout scanning tunnels from scratch and Sears has spun off its own “Big Data” service provider.

Besides, the landscape is littered with the corpses of alternative payment startups that had good ideas but never got traction over the past decade. Buying the remnants of one of those dead startups and repurposing its technology is easily in the range of larger chains.

Any retailer that can train customers to pay with something—anything—that doesn’t bear a Visa or MasterCard logo has taken a real step toward getting out from under interchange. Now that chains have figured out the best they can get from the card brands is pocket change and an eight-month discount (with a side order of pushback from Walmart), maybe they’re ready to take that next step.

But don’t count on it. Lawsuits are really seductive, they take years to resolve and the results tend to favor the biggest players. And while that $6 billion settlement might not really be good for any retailer, keeping the lawsuit going is definitely good for Walmart.