Food for plastic: NYCE and Mac add retail sites.

The two dominant electronic banking networks in the Northeast announced advances Tuesday in their point-of-sale debit card programs.

NYCE, the largest automated teller machine network in the region and second-largest nationwide, said it had agreed to place terminals at 146 stores in the Pathmark supermarket chain, which is owned by Supermarkets General Corp.

Mac, the network owned by CoreStates Financial Corp., said a Burger King franchisee in Philadelphia has begun accepting Mac cards in place of cash.

Coveted Locations

Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants are among the sites most coveted for ATM networks' expanding point-of-sale programs. The NYCE and Mac announcements point up the eastern spread of a technology that had won success earlier in the West. Most prominent was the Interlink system that several California banks established in the mid-1980s; it is now owned by Visa U.S.A.

NYCE, which formally announced its latest point-of-sale deal this week after hinting at it during its annual member conference in early May, said Pathmark will add 1,890 terminals -- the largest such NYCE installation to date.

Pathmark stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware will increase the NYCE point-of-sale network by 75%, to about 4,400 terminals.

Wegman's, an upstate New York supermarket, has 1,500 NYCE terminals in 60 stores, and other sizable networks are going into Price Chopper and Shop-Rite stores.

Mac, which has a 10,000-terminal point-of-sale network for credit and debit cards, said a Burger King outlet owned by North-Serv Systems Inc. has joined selected Roy Rogers and McDonald's locations in accepting Mac cards.

Mac handles one million POS transactions a month, third or fourth in the nation and about one-ninth of Interlink's volume. NYCE was not in the POST Top 10 as of publication last fall of a Bank Network News listing.

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