It doesn't seem like a big deal, but this is just so much more annoying than using my palm that not only links my payment method but also prime membership.

Now I need to tap through a stupid app and scan a code.

We always stopped at whole foods on the way home from the gym, and I didn't always have my phone with me or readily accessible. This will definitely cause me to cut back on this quick stop in / impulse purchases.

I think “just” is doing a lot of work here.

  Steps I remember:
  1. Put down everything so you have 2 free hands. 
  2. Mention that it will take a minute to the cashier.  
  3. Unlock your phone.
  4. Find the Amazon app (this part is odd, you’re at Whole Foods).
  5. Dig around in the UI for the store code.  They move it around. 
  6. Present your phone to the cashier to scan.

Ah, perhaps I should try this Whole Foods app. The Amazon app is very slow and requires a good data connection to launch so it's mildly inconvenient when you've already reached checkout and it won't open for you to get the QR code.

The palm thing was never prompted as part of checkout, it's true. I just did it while I was being checked out once years ago since it seemed so cool and it worked flawlessly since then. Honestly, I found the UX of it really all well done. Even if it didn't make it in the long term, I hope the team knows there were a few happy users out here!

EDIT: I just installed the Whole Foods app and it opens directly to the QR code. That's nice. It also selects the appropriate payment method. There doesn't seem to be a watch equivalent so I'll have to pull my phone out, but this definitely reduces the terrible blow of losing the palm scan. I hope it works well without good Internet access!

The Whole Foods we go to is in a cellular dead zone. So much time is wasted by people standing there waiting for their phone to load.

Oh the alternative isn't taking a credit card out of my wallet and all that. It's scanning my Amazon Prime QR code and then tapping my watch after selecting the credit card. But it isn't "hard" per-se, just mildly inconvenient, and yes it doesn't take much inconvenience for me to volunteer my biometrics. Clearly that isn't sufficiently common a position or they wouldn't be removing it so your surprise is likely quite common as well.

It's another small source of friction. I don't know if biometrics are the solution, but I do find for example that I'm much more comfortable buying on a website I've used before and already has my card details, rather than giving them to a new website.

The useful data in that story is the eating and shopping habits collected by the transaction. What are they going to do with the arrangement of lines on your palm, likely stored as a compressed latent vector not useful for reconstruction?

Despite others saying that they have never seen it, Meijer stores have this, except instead of a store scanner you use your phone with an app. There are other reasons too, but this is a big part of why my family shops at Meijer compared every other store near us.

Haha no. US commerce improvements tend to trail EU by a decade.

We just got tap to pay a couple of years ago. People still pass bits of paper with signatures on them to pay each other for stuff.

That does not exist in the US as far as I've seen.

There's Amazon's "just walk out" stuff, which they just killed.

No, I've never seen that in the US.

To be fair with scan & go you still have to scan your membership card which would be the equivalent of typing in your phone number.

But most retail tech in the US is suuuuper backwards. They were still signing credit card receipts until very recently. The way you pay for petrol/gas is bonkers.

You wave your hand over a camera.

At this point I presume they collect such biometrics whether I like it or not; they have cameras everywhere.

> I doubt HN could knock over an Amazon site

Not every amazon site is cloud-scale. Niche product like this might be running bare metal under someone's desk

I just signed up and used it at Whole Foods. For me, and for that use case only it removes a step of loading the Whole Foods app to scan a QR code for my account.

But have no idea why anyone else would adopt this.

If you trust Amazon, they were never storing images of your actual palm but instead creating and storing unique hashes from that data. Again, if you trust them, they did it in just about the most privacy protecting way possible.

How does that compare with Google? I tried updating my Google Mini smart speakers to have Gemini and it still seems dumb as a box of rocks.