Over 65 Whole Foods stores located across California have adopted Amazon palm-scanning technology as a means of payment. A technology that let customers pay with just a scan of their palm.
The checkout device was introduced in 2020 as part of the Amazon One payment service. This is the biggest rollout by the company yet, with the first new Whole Foods locations adding support in Malibu, Montana Avenue, and Santa Monica on Wednesday.
With Amazon One, customers can register their palm print using a kiosk or at a point-of-sale station at any participating stores. To register, customers need to provide a payment card and phone number and agree to Amazon’s term
of service and share an image of their palms. Once completed, customers can take items to check out and not have to take out their wallets – or even their phones. Just a hover of their hand over the device is all that’s needed to pay and leave.
The Amazon One rollout is part of the company’s campaign to change how customers interact at retail stores and runs alongside its Just Walk Out-enabled stores with technologies that make it faster to pay.
Amazon One is designed to identify you accurately and allow you to pay at Amazon-owned stores, but the company is looking to expand the technology to outside businesses as well.
Since the introduction of the payment system by Amazon One, several Whole Foods locations have already been testing the palm-scanning tech in the LA area as well in Austin, Seattle, and New York. It’s also been available at the company’s Amazon Style store in Glendale and at the select Amazon Go and Fresh stores.
Amazon has set up a fortune in encouraging millions of customers to provide them with data in exchange for a more convenient lifestyle. Things like online shopping, grocery shopping, using Alexa, Ring smart cameras, doorbells, and now room-mapping robot vacuum cleaners are all areas that Amazon collects data in, and that will continue to be a concern to privacy advocates.
In 2020, James Vincent, a writer from The Verge wrote an article on how the technology works, it emphasized that the images taken on the kiosk aren’t stored locally; instead, they are encrypted and then sent to a cloud server that is dedicated to Amazon One, where an identifiable palm signature is generated.
