Soon, You’ll Be Able to Pay at Whole Foods With the Palm of Your Hand
If you opt to use the feature, the scanner identifies customers with both their palm and underlying vein structure.
Photo courtesy of Amazon
Soon, when you shop at Whole Foods, you could walk out with your bags of groceries without ever touching your wallet or phone — or pretty much anything at all. Amazon is rolling out a new feature at the grocery chain that will let you pay with a wave of the palm of your hand — just by holding it over a palm-recognition device — promising a checkout experience that is “fast, convenient and contactless.”
By the end of the year, Whole Foods will have rolled out Amazon One palm recognition in all 500-plus of its U.S. stores, it has announced. The feature is already available in more than 200 Whole Foods Market locations in states including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Amazon One is also teaming up with other businesses to use the technology to help speed identification and payment processes, provide loyalty program access, verify age, and offer secure entrance to sports and entertainment facilities and office buildings. For instance, Panera Bread is using the tech to pull up MyPanera loyalty account information and offer palm-enabled payment, and Coors Field, where the Colorado Rockies baseball team plays, is employing Amazon One to verify that customers are over 21 for alcohol purchases.
To use the palm-payment method the first time, you pre-enroll online with your credit or debit card, Amazon account and cell-phone number and then complete the process by scanning your palm over an Amazon One device at a participating Whole Foods. You can also enroll in the store with your credit card and phone number using an Amazon One device. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, once you’re enrolled in Amazon One, you’ll automatically receive your Prime savings and other member benefits applied to your Whole Foods Market store purchases. No more check-out-line panicking about logging in and finding the right QR code to snag savings and benefits, as an impatient line forms behind you.
“We are always looking for new ways to delight our customers and improve the shopping experience,” Leandro Balbinot, chief technology officer at Whole Foods Market, says in a statement. “Since we’ve introduced Amazon One at Whole Foods Market stores over the past two years, we’ve seen that customers love the convenience it provides, and we’re excited to bring Amazon One to all of our customers across the U.S.”
Amazon emphasizes that the technology is secure, with your information stored in a secure cloud and safeguarded with multiple levels of tamper-resistant controls. “Unlike a credit card or password, an Amazon One palm signature can’t be replicated to impersonate a customer,” the company notes. “That’s because Amazon One does not use raw palm images to identify a person. Instead, it looks at both the palm and underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation — called a ‘palm signature’ – for identity matching.”
It looks like the future may literally be in the palm of our hands.
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