This is a great article but somewhat misses the point.

Consumers only "use Passbook" when retailers make content available in Passbook. Passbook is just a browser,similar to Internet Explorer or Safari. Retailers create coupons, cards, etc, for it, just the same as they create web pages to be displayed in Safari.

If there's no content for it, it has nothing to show. So the better question is: "Why aren't more retailers providing content for Passbook?"

Certainly the benefits for retailers are huge. Setting up Passbook content is easy... literally takes a couple hours (compared to months to create a retail mobile app) and it's 20-50 times easier to distribute these cards compared to mobile apps (in fact most retailers can't distribute many of their retail apps at all...Passbook at least gives them something that customers will actually grab.)

There are a dozen different firms that provide dashboards that make setting up Passes easy.

So when will retailers take advantage of such simple and inexpensive marketing channel, to provide coupons, cards, or even simple branding, via Passbook? Then consumers will use it happily.

We tested a few sample coupons with several thousand consumers and found zero resistance.