Quote from: nullama on December 23, 2021, 02:27:50 AM

Elektra supermarket in Mexico recently started accepting Bitcoin payments and is encouraging their clients to do so, as they offer a 20% discount when paying with it (until end of the year).

Here's the promo banner (in Spanish):

-snip-

Now people in Mexico are able to buy groceries, and retail in general using Bitcoin directly.

An interesting thing to consider is that the parent company, Grupo Elektra, has operations in these countries: Mexico, US, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Panama, and El Salvador.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Elektra

That means that they already accept Bitcoin directly from at least 2 countries: Mexico, and El Salvador. Some of the other countries in that list could potentially be the next one.

Good initiative by them. They are aware that bitcoin has a huge potential to attract more users eventually. Giving a huge 20% discount on top of that means that they are actually serious about accepting bitcoin and wants more user to use it. I am sure more online stores and shops will eventually follow the same step.

Quote from: Fundamentals Of on December 23, 2021, 02:45:25 AM

How are their customers able to pay in Bitcoin? Is there a local wallet app in the country that is popular that could be used for the grocery transactions between customers and the store? I am asking because if transactions are all done on-chain, I might end up paying a bigger amount for fees than the groceries I'm buying. I might end up paying more for my transaction to be confirmed than the packs of coffee I'm buying. Or are they possibly making use of lightning network?

They can use their own wallet. The fees right now is very reasonable and not that high at all. It would be totally worth it for them to pay the fees since they will be getting a huge 20% off. Would be an issue when the network gets congested, yeah. But I guess they will be adding more currencies soon.