I've been shopping at Kroger regularly for decades and my guess is that it might have something to do with the timing around their last major payment terminal u

I've been shopping at Kroger regularly for decades and my guess is that it might have something to do with the timing around their last major payment terminal upgrade. They upgraded before NFC payments were very popular but fairly close to when they really needed to support chip cards (my recollection was that the payment networks were saying they would no longer insure against fraud without a chip terminal), and it seems like for whatever reason they went with a terminal that didn't support it. I remember being annoyed with seeing all of the seemingly brand-new hardware being installed at multiple locations that very obviously lacked NFC payment support.