Skip to main content

Pay-with-palm coming to all of Amazon’s Whole Foods Market stores

A person using their palm to pay at a Whole Foods Market store.
Amazon

Amazon is expanding its Amazon One palm-recognition payment system to all 500 of its Whole Foods Market stores in the U.S., with the rollout to be completed by the end of this year.

Recommended Videos

It means that, once signed up, shoppers at the store will no longer have to mess about with their phone or card at the checkout, instead simply waving their palms over the reader to pay for their items. Savings will automatically be applied to goods for Prime members who link their Amazon One profile with their Amazon account.

Amazon launched its pay-with-palm feature in 2020 and currently offers it in around 200 stores across the U.S., so this latest expansion is a significant one.

Newbies to the system can enroll online with their credit or debit card, Amazon account, and mobile number. Setup is then completed in-store by scanning a palm over an Amazon One device on the next visit to a participating Whole Foods Market store. The system reads a person’s palm and underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation, called a “palm signature,” for identity matching.

Amazon One Palm Payment is Coming to Whole Foods | Amazon News

Alternatively, the entire enrollment process can be carried out in the store at an Amazon One device using a credit card and phone number.

“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, said in a post on Amazon’s website. “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.”

The system is certainly a convenient way to pay, though some privacy advocates have raised concerns about Amazon collecting and storing biometric data linked to U.S. citizens. On its website, Amazon says it will not share palm data with third parties unless it’s required to comply with a legally valid and binding order.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more
Apple TV+ just got a price slash that’s tough to resist, and it won’t last long
The Apple TV main screen.

Apple has just quietly announced that it will be slashing the price on its Apple TV+ offering for a limited time deal.

While Apple prices the service at a standard $9.99 per month usually, it has just cut that way down to $2.99 per month.

Read more