Column: Why your Google wallet will need a plastic backup

The convenience of “mobile money” was supposed to be a next big thing for the American consumer, but it doesn’t look like that’s happening any time soon.

Google this week announced it is adding a debit card made of genuine plastic to its virtual payments system, Google Wallet, in order to make it a little more useful to consumers than it is now.

It is an admission that mobile money isn’t as compelling to the American consumer as it is to big business, at least for the present. Or, at the very least, that the intense competition among players has effectively prevented any one of them -- including Google -- from making a success of it.