This is sad. I loved paying by palm at Whole Foods because it was definitely the fastest way to do things. You just scanned and you were out. Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime and then tap my watch and select the right credit card (palm scan always used my groceries card). Ah well, perhaps adoption was low.
I just scan the QR code from the Whole Foods app on my phone. Then tap the button to pay with the credit card linked to the account.
For security reasons, it makes sense that if you use your phone number rather than the QR code, of course you don't have the option to utilize the linked card.
Meant to register the palm thing but just never got around to it, wasn't even really sure how/where? That was the main blocker for me -- was never prompted to do it as part of checkout, and didn't want to waste time going over to customer service to ask how.
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.
If you have an iOS phone you can create a shortcut on your home screen that jumps directly to the code in the Amazon app. Whole Foods app may have the Shortcuts integration too, but I use the Amazon app.
The code both applies your Prime membership and links your preferred payment method.
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.
The WF store I frequent has lousy cell reception, so add th step “open Settings app and get on store’s wifi” (and who knows what all that lets them track).
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!
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.
I find scanning QR codes at the POS hugely inconvenient compared to paying with my watch. The discount has to be substantial for me to ever scan them.
Retailer apps are often surprisingly (expectably?) bad at dealing with spotty/no connectivity, and even if they aren't, getting my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, getting to the right screen in it (oh, did it just log me out?) etc. takes about 10x as long as arming my smartwatch in a convenient moment and tapping it once the terminal asks for it. It doesn't even require a free hand, since the range of mine is much better than that of passive contactless cards.
I like linking to the Amazon account because apart from the discounts (which are nice), it puts the receipt in my Amazon orders list. Yes, at Gus's there's no such linking feature or discount and I just tap my watch after selecting the appropriate card.
Amazon's app is just like what you describe. It is extraordinarily slow and needs a high-speed data network.
I would love that, but it doesn't seem to happen for me if I use the credit card that I have linked to my Amazon Prime membership as the payment method. When I tap it doesn't recognize my Prime membership. Do you have the Amazon Prime credit card perhaps?
The reason why I did the QR code and watch tap thing prior to the palm thing is that I didn't want to carry a single-use credit card.
I'd love the functionality you're talking about. Do you remember how you set it up to get that? Would love to have my grocery card automatically recognized as being linked to a Prime membership.
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?
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.
> Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime
Haven't the (big) supermarkets in the US adopted the whole "scan and go" thing that lots of countries in Europe have had for a long time? (maybe more than a decade at this point I think)
When I go to the supermarket, right after the entrance, I pick up a scanner, then as I pick stuff, I scan them and pack them. Then when I'm done, you scan a code, give back the scanner, take your stuff and leave. Kind of assumed this was done in the US first and then spread here, but maybe it started here? Not sure.
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.
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.
I tap a piece of plastic in two seconds and not only do I not have to give any tech giants my biometrics, they're not added as middleman in the transaction at all.
Like literally scan your palm? There’s no way that’s on device like a fingerprint reader on your iPhone either. You’re okay with just providing biometric data to a large corp like that. Makes me shudder.
A grainy image of your palm from a surveillance camera capture is not going to expose biometric data. Your hand needs to be close enough to make out the detail required. Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours, not something you can replicate at scale. You’re giving them your palm print/vein scan tied to your identity on a plate. It’s very irresponsible.
I really doubt getting a reasonably good image of my hand is tough for Amazon. But they don't really need my palm at all; most of the point of that was probably that it'd be much freakier to normies if the self-checkout just said "hi Bob!" when you got close via facial recognition.
> Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours…
That seems deeply unlikely. I'm probably on 50 different cameras at a Whole Foods, some of which I'd never notice, and at some point I have to check out, which ties all that footage to a credit card and my Prime account if I don't want to pay the non-deal prices for everything.
Faces are easier to change. Grow a beard, wear some glasses, put on some weight or some surgery if you really need to. Can’t change your eye print, finder prints, vein pattern or DNA.
Apple's FaceID can figure out who you are even with a N95 mask and sunglasses on.
And in most scenarios, you're gonna a) pay with a card with your name on it and b) head out to your car with its unique ID prominently displayed on it.
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I found the palm payment at Whole Foods to be very convenient for the same reason as others in this thread.
The steps without using Amazon One were
* open the amazon app
* open the checkout thing
* click the QR code button
* click the amazon QR code
* Scan it
* Open Apple Wallet
* Pay
I hope that they will at least add the amazon QR code to apple wallet to make payment faster in store. That or something to make payment (with Amazon Prime link) as fast as with Amazon One even while not continuing Amazon One itself.
I wonder if they could use a NFC tag or something to quickly open the amazon app on your phone to pay or something?
I didn't even know this was available to other businesses -- I've only ever seen it at Whole Foods.
Curious if they're keeping it at Whole Foods or discontinuing the hardware altogether? Can't say I've ever once seen someone actually use it to pay there.
They also had this as option to pay at Amazon Fresh, which seemed odd to me. You needed to use your phone to scan the QR code from your phone anyway, and they charged the credit card on file in your Amazon account.
These were neat to use at whole foods but I never saw them anywhere else. I guess Amazon just didn't really have much penetration in payment terminals in general. Maybe a deal with clover or toast could have changed things.
Wonder what stunted adoption of this? High costs, users not liking it b/c privacy, credit cards/tap to pay being a good enough experience already? The handful of times I used this, it was nice.
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.
I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.
This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.
No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.
Other things:
- Great for todo/reminders with timers
- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"
- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.
This is sad. I loved paying by palm at Whole Foods because it was definitely the fastest way to do things. You just scanned and you were out. Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime and then tap my watch and select the right credit card (palm scan always used my groceries card). Ah well, perhaps adoption was low.
I just scan the QR code from the Whole Foods app on my phone. Then tap the button to pay with the credit card linked to the account.
For security reasons, it makes sense that if you use your phone number rather than the QR code, of course you don't have the option to utilize the linked card.
Meant to register the palm thing but just never got around to it, wasn't even really sure how/where? That was the main blocker for me -- was never prompted to do it as part of checkout, and didn't want to waste time going over to customer service to ask how.
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.
If you have an iOS phone you can create a shortcut on your home screen that jumps directly to the code in the Amazon app. Whole Foods app may have the Shortcuts integration too, but I use the Amazon app.
The code both applies your Prime membership and links your preferred payment method.
I think “just” is doing a lot of work here.
1. I've already put down the groceries I was carrying, so the cashier can scan them. I have free hands.
2. The cashier is busy scanning, you don't need to mention anything.
3. FaceID unlocks it automatically.
4. What Amazon app? I use the Whole Foods app. I keep it easily accessible, I don't need to find it.
5. The code is always displayed by default when you open the app. You never have to dig around anything.
6. Or scan it yourself under the customer-facing scanner they have for that.
The WF store I frequent has lousy cell reception, so add th step “open Settings app and get on store’s wifi” (and who knows what all that lets them track).
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.
I've been bitten by that. I genuinely can't even guess why it needs internet to generate the code. Shouldn't it just be a TOTP-type thing?
Is it really that hard to take an credit card out your purse or wallet and tap it that you were happy to hand over biometric data to amazon?
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.
I find scanning QR codes at the POS hugely inconvenient compared to paying with my watch. The discount has to be substantial for me to ever scan them.
Retailer apps are often surprisingly (expectably?) bad at dealing with spotty/no connectivity, and even if they aren't, getting my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, getting to the right screen in it (oh, did it just log me out?) etc. takes about 10x as long as arming my smartwatch in a convenient moment and tapping it once the terminal asks for it. It doesn't even require a free hand, since the range of mine is much better than that of passive contactless cards.
I like linking to the Amazon account because apart from the discounts (which are nice), it puts the receipt in my Amazon orders list. Yes, at Gus's there's no such linking feature or discount and I just tap my watch after selecting the appropriate card.
Amazon's app is just like what you describe. It is extraordinarily slow and needs a high-speed data network.
Amazon prime is tied to your credit card. One single action to pay: tap credit card against reader
Why do you have so many hoops to jump through like presenting QR code and tapping watch
I would love that, but it doesn't seem to happen for me if I use the credit card that I have linked to my Amazon Prime membership as the payment method. When I tap it doesn't recognize my Prime membership. Do you have the Amazon Prime credit card perhaps?
The reason why I did the QR code and watch tap thing prior to the palm thing is that I didn't want to carry a single-use credit card.
I'd love the functionality you're talking about. Do you remember how you set it up to get that? Would love to have my grocery card automatically recognized as being linked to a Prime membership.
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?
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.
Amazon, 1998: hello we sell books but online
Amazon, 2023: please return to your Primehouse for your nightly Primemeal, valued Primecitizen
- krang t. nelson
> Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime
Haven't the (big) supermarkets in the US adopted the whole "scan and go" thing that lots of countries in Europe have had for a long time? (maybe more than a decade at this point I think)
When I go to the supermarket, right after the entrance, I pick up a scanner, then as I pick stuff, I scan them and pack them. Then when I'm done, you scan a code, give back the scanner, take your stuff and leave. Kind of assumed this was done in the US first and then spread here, but maybe it started here? Not sure.
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.
> We just got tap to pay a couple of years ago
You mean NFC payments? :| Oh, and checks too? I guess things were very different than my assumption, interesting thing to have learned today. Thanks!
I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently. NFC has been around for a long time.
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.
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.
No, I've never seen that in the US.
I tap a piece of plastic in two seconds and not only do I not have to give any tech giants my biometrics, they're not added as middleman in the transaction at all.
Like literally scan your palm? There’s no way that’s on device like a fingerprint reader on your iPhone either. You’re okay with just providing biometric data to a large corp like that. Makes me shudder.
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.
Isn't it a deep vein scanner? Much harder to spoof than still images or even video.
Hard to spoof. Not hard to collect.
A grainy image of your palm from a surveillance camera capture is not going to expose biometric data. Your hand needs to be close enough to make out the detail required. Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours, not something you can replicate at scale. You’re giving them your palm print/vein scan tied to your identity on a plate. It’s very irresponsible.
> A grainy image of your palm
I really doubt getting a reasonably good image of my hand is tough for Amazon. But they don't really need my palm at all; most of the point of that was probably that it'd be much freakier to normies if the self-checkout just said "hi Bob!" when you got close via facial recognition.
> Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours…
That seems deeply unlikely. I'm probably on 50 different cameras at a Whole Foods, some of which I'd never notice, and at some point I have to check out, which ties all that footage to a credit card and my Prime account if I don't want to pay the non-deal prices for everything.
Faces are easier to change. Grow a beard, wear some glasses, put on some weight or some surgery if you really need to. Can’t change your eye print, finder prints, vein pattern or DNA.
That's not really been the case for years now.
Apple's FaceID can figure out who you are even with a N95 mask and sunglasses on.
And in most scenarios, you're gonna a) pay with a card with your name on it and b) head out to your car with its unique ID prominently displayed on it.
Click on the link to read about this:
Is it the HN "Hug of Death" ?I doubt HN could knock over an Amazon site. They're probably geoblocking regions where that service never operated.
> 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 found the palm payment at Whole Foods to be very convenient for the same reason as others in this thread.
The steps without using Amazon One were
* open the amazon app
* open the checkout thing
* click the QR code button
* click the amazon QR code
* Scan it
* Open Apple Wallet
* Pay
I hope that they will at least add the amazon QR code to apple wallet to make payment faster in store. That or something to make payment (with Amazon Prime link) as fast as with Amazon One even while not continuing Amazon One itself.
I wonder if they could use a NFC tag or something to quickly open the amazon app on your phone to pay or something?
I didn't even know this was available to other businesses -- I've only ever seen it at Whole Foods.
Curious if they're keeping it at Whole Foods or discontinuing the hardware altogether? Can't say I've ever once seen someone actually use it to pay there.
I literally just signed up for this. Guess I have the killing touch.
I don’t see the point though. It is a payment solution in search of a problem. It is a nice bonus first party payment solution at Whole Foods though.
I used it once, a couple of weeks ago. Had been meaning to sign up for a couple of years and then just randomly completed the process recently.
They've had them permanently installed at Seattle's largest indoor sports/entertainment arena
Is this what the 16,000 were working on?
They also had this as option to pay at Amazon Fresh, which seemed odd to me. You needed to use your phone to scan the QR code from your phone anyway, and they charged the credit card on file in your Amazon account.
These were neat to use at whole foods but I never saw them anywhere else. I guess Amazon just didn't really have much penetration in payment terminals in general. Maybe a deal with clover or toast could have changed things.
Wonder what stunted adoption of this? High costs, users not liking it b/c privacy, credit cards/tap to pay being a good enough experience already? The handful of times I used this, it was nice.
I was personally creeped out by it at the handful of Whole Foods I saw this. I’d rather tap and pay or pay by QR code.
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.
My doctor's office was using it. I didn't want to give them my biometric data.
People don't want to give Amazon their biometrics?
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.
Amazon it on a killing spree lately it seems
I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.
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.
This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.
No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.
Other things:
- Great for todo/reminders with timers
- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"
- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.
It's almost like a ... voice operating system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796745
It's interesting how despite Google and Amazon both canceling products constantly, only one is infamous for the practice.