For the better part of five years, the tech press has been hyping a brutal war-of-all-against-all for a business known as mobile payments—basically, using your phone to pay cashiers rather than unsheathing your credit card. Americans spend over $4 trillion each year at the checkout counter. Assuming that 60 percent of those transactions involve credit-card and debit-card swipes, and that the card-processing fees average upward of 1 percent of the sale, we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars awaiting the winner of this Hobbesian smack-down. Hence the obsessive interest of tech companies like Apple, Google, and PayPal, and wireless carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T—to say nothing of the existing middlemen, like Visa and American Express, who desperately want to cling to their spoils.

And yet despite these companies’ considerable efforts, the actual prize keeps failing to materialize. At least in the United States. Consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America are all warming to the idea of buying stuff with their phones. But American shoppers are unmoved. The uptake has been so flaccid that the consulting firm Gartner recently downgraded its projections of worldwide mobile payments growth, specifically fingering “low adoption” in North America as the culprit.

It’s all the more puzzling given that the proposition works out beautifully on paper. Retailers, who pay the credit card fees (after passing much of them along to you), should have every incentive to lower them, which mobile payments companies accomplish by policing fraud better and driving a harder bargain with the credit card giants. Mobile payments would also help retailers collect more data about your shopping habits—never a bad thing from their perspective. For their part, consumers should enjoy the ease and security of ditching their wallets and, say, simply touching their phone to a sensor in order to complete a sale.

The reason this isn’t happening seems simple at first, but offers an interesting insight into human psychology. In a nutshell: Americans rather like using their credits cards in stores, notwithstanding their periodic kvetching. In parts of Africa and South America, the banking infrastructure is somewhere between unreliable and non-existent. Transacting by way of cell phone is far more practical. In parts of Europe, the banking system is more advanced, but lines in retail outlets are so notoriously long that consumers will do anything to move through them more quickly. Again, one sees the appeal of paying by cell phone.

But in the States, lines are typically more manageable, and swiping a credit card is almost as seamless as breathing, even if the process could be sped up slightly. In this context, mobile payments can look like a solution in search of a problem. A recent survey by the retail consultancy RSR Research asked consumers how they expected to pay for in-store purchases in five years, then presented several options. Fifty-nine percent of Brazilians, 48 percent of Russians, and 42 percent of Germans envisioned themselves paying by mobile phone. By contrast, a mere 24 percent of Americans responded the same way. (And, in case you’re wondering, young people are not the answer here: Even fewer Americans aged 18-to-29 expected to switch to their phones—a mere 22 percent.)