PayPal announced on Monday that it has reached deals with 23 major national retailers to enable customers to pay with PayPal in stores.

Participating retailers include: Famous Footwear, Dollar General, Mapco Express, RadioShack, Spartan Stores, Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, the Home Depot, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct, and Toys “R” Us. The other two will be named soon, PayPal says.

“Delivering valuable digital and mobile payments is alive and thriving, and consumers all over the U.S. will now start seeing PayPal more where they shop every day, including the grocery store and at the gas pump,” says PayPal VP, Retail Services, Don Kingsborough. “We believe that by bringing value to the checkout experience ‘every day’ with proven technology that is simple, fast, and secure and offering true benefits such as coupons, rewards and loyalty, we’ve uncovered a winning solution when people pay. No bells, whistles or buzzes – just technology that works and gets the most from your money.”

These are some big name retailers, for sure, and that means a big boost to PayPal as a payment options for many consumers. It stands to reason that the company will only expand on this roster, surely making mobile payments a much bigger phenomenon in 2013. PayPal has an edge over rivals given its longtime brand recognition.

“This is an exciting time at PayPal because our path to enabling people to pay with PayPal in the store has now gone from a vision to a reality,” says Kingsboough. “We are executing on our vision of cloud-based payments to enable true convenience across any channel from your laptop to your smartphone or the store. Some of the competition has stumbled with alternative technology offerings that don’t address true customer pain points – they have created technology, just for technology’s sake.”

According to PayPal, there are 18,000 stores in the U.S. where you use PayPal.

If all of that wasn’t enough, however, PayPal will soon be available in millions of locations, according to Kingsborough. According to multiple reports, PayPal has also struck a deal with NCR, which will see PayPal payments in NCR’s mobile apps and restaurant and retail services. According to VentureBeat, NCR powers payments for half of the major retail chains and 38% of the top 100 restaurants in the U.S.

Update: Kingsborough just formally announced the NCR partnership on the PayPal blog. He gives the following details:

In the first phase, NCR will integrate PayPal mobile payment options into the recently announced NCR Mobile Pay application and NCR Aloha Online Ordering. With this integration, PayPal will be a payment option and allow consumers greater choice for simple, fast and secure purchases, alongside credit or debit cards. Consumers will also be able to use the PayPal mobile application to locate, order-ahead and “check-in” at participating NCR Mobile Pay merchants to access the same functionality.