Commerce in the Palm of Your Hand – The future of tech & retail in the US

Over the last decade, brick & mortar retail has been accelerating toward increasingly seamless shopper experiences. In the US, select Whole Foods Market stores have recently reached new level of frictionless – quite literally – with the ability to check out with a simple wave of the hand.

Whole Foods Market is expanding its stores enabled with Amazon One technology, which debuted in the Seattle market last year into all seven stores in the retailer’s home Austin, TX market. The technology utilizes a biometric identifier (in this case, the shopper’s unique palm signature), and ties that information to their credit card. Sign up for the service takes less than a minute according to Amazon, and can be done at a special self-serve kiosk in participating stores. Shoppers simply insert their credit card and then follow the prompts to pair their card with their palm signature, and the Amazon One custom-built algorithms and hardware do the rest.

“We are excited to introduce Amazon One as an option for our Austin-area Whole Foods Market customers,” Leandro Balbinot, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Whole Foods, said in a statement. “We are always looking for new ways to satisfy and delight our customers and offer convenient options to improve the shopping experience.” This technology will not only enable everyday activities such as checkout and payment at a store, but also streamline loyalty card usage, and could also serve as secure entry at sites like a store, stadium or workplace.

With another recession looming on the horizon coupled with increased store labour costs and recent pandemic, this frictionless checkout future may well be the norm sooner rather than later.