Amazon One connects the palm to their credit card and lets them pay without waiting in line.
Amazon
Amazon has expanded its palm-scan payment system to a Whole Foods store in Seattle, the company announced Wednesday, the first of many planned deployments elsewhere.
Amazon One, which debuted in September and is currently used in about a dozen physical stores in Amazon, allows the buyer to pay for items by placing their palm over a scanning device. The first time buyers use the kiosk, they need to insert a credit card to pair it with their palm print. But after that, buyers can pay by just holding their hand over the kiosk.
Amazon One is different from the enterprise Just Walk Out technology, which allows retailers to pick up items and walk out of the store without going through a pay line. However, the two technologies can work together, and Amazon uses both at the cashless Amazon Go stores.
Amazon will initially expand Amazon One at the Whole Foods in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, not far from the company’s headquarters, before launching the system at seven Whole Foods in Seattle in the coming months.
The palm-scanning technology is offered as just one of the many payment options at the participating Whole Foods stores, Amazon said and will have no impact on the work responsibilities of stores.
Amazon acquired the grocery chain in 2017 for more than $ 13 billion.
Amazon has said it wants to sell palm-scanning technology to other companies such as retailers, stadiums and office buildings. Last September, Amazon said it was in ‘active talks with several potential customers’.
It is unclear whether Amazon has signed any agreements with third parties interested in using the system. The company says thousands of people have signed up to use it at Amazon stores.
As Amazon has sought to expand and empower palm-scanning technology as a means of payment, privacy and security experts have also expressed concern about the dangers of handing over biometric data to buyers.
Amazon has maintained that it has designed the system as ‘very secure’ and that it considers palm-scanning technology more privately than other biometric alternatives such as face recognition.