The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is joining Citigroup and Mastercard to set up a mobile payment system that would let Android users wave their phones in front of a small reader at a checkout counter to pay for something.

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It means that I can use my PayPal account and at the checkout counter, I just use my cellphone number and a pin.

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"It's all about how fast they can get customers through the checkout counter, " says Madeline Aufseeser, a payments-industry analyst at Aite Group LLC, a financial-services research firm, who is skeptical many large merchants would try surcharging for fear of angering consumers.

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They are such a status symbol that Lids, the hat store chain, tells its workers not to remove them at the checkout counter.

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