After opening the first cashier-free stores in the United States, Amazon opens the first Whole Foods where cameras will track purchases. You can then leave the shop and pay “with your hand”.
Amazon’s first Whole Foods store opens today in the UK
So yes, it is appropriate to say that you can do the shopping and go to the exit paying “with your hands, with your hands, with your hands, bye bye”. In 2017 the colossus Amazon bought the chain of stores Whole Foods, particularly popular in the US and UK. Just today, the company opened the first of these stores featuring Just Walk Out technology, which helps you avoid queues. How? Avoiding the crates!
In fact, technology allows you to pay simply with the palm of your hand. Operation is as follows: you enter the shop by identifying yourself at the entrance, you choose the products that interest you and you go out paying by hand. Each user must obviously be registered, with a connected credit / debit card. Thus biometric technology (which recognizes the pattern of the veins of the Palm of the hand) manages to identify which card to charge for. If you want, you can also use a QR code instead of your hand, which still remains one of the most reliable and secure biometrics.
Compared to other Amazon stores without cashiers in the United States and Europe (such as Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Style) the novelty of the new shop lies in the total automation of product scanning. These in fact do not have to be manually confirmed by the user. A camera system will follow the movements of the buyers. In this way it will be possible to independently determine which products leave the shelves and are “added to the cart”. Final payment will therefore be immediate, without the need to remove the purchased products from their bag. What is the future of physical shops?