While not an official partner for Apple Pay, the presence of NFC terminals at many Home Depot locations across the country has enabled the contactless payment service to work as normal at select stores in the home improvement chain. Today, however, a user on Reddit received a response from Home Depot customer care that suggests the company may soon begin quietly phasing out support for Apple Pay completely at its brick-and-mortar stores, with PayPal highlighted as an alternative solution for customers.

"We currently do not accept Apple Pay in our local stores or online. We do have the option of using PayPal, in store or online. We may offer this feature in the future, but we currently do not have a time frame for this and if we are going to accept Apple Pay. We truly apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you Andrew."

The company's response leaves an open door for the re-activation of Apple Pay in its stores in the future, but doesn't commit to confirming that Apple's NFC-based payment service will ever be seen at their checkout counters again. Apple recently updated a support document on its website confirming that Home Depot "might not be currently set up to accept contactless payments, including Apple Pay" at this current time.

Although no direct reason is given, the company's mention of supporting PayPal online and in-store is a pretty good piece of evidence that Home Depot may simply be siding with a different electronic payments solution. It's also worth pointing out that a few responses on the original Reddit thread have had no trouble with using Apple Pay in their own local stores, so either the company is keeping quiet support of the service or it's taking a slow rollout to dismantling support for Apple Pay.