E-commerce retailer Amazon was already known as the innovator to beat before it opened its first Amazon Go store to the public in January 2018. Today, there are 24 Amazon Go locations, with more on the way, and the company continues to innovate. The stores’ “just walk out” technology allows customers to scan their phone to enter the store, grab what they want and leave without a conventional checkout process.
The Seattle-based online retailer is expanding its brick-and-mortar plans to a grocery concept. Rumors of such a move swirled around the company since before Amazon Go opened and were confirmed only when the company posted job listings for a store in Woodland Hills, Calif. The store is slated to open sometime in 2020.
Amazon has stated that it does not use facial recognition, but the New York Post reported in September that Amazon is experimenting with biometric scanning. If that’s true, Amazon Prime customers could start paying by scanning their hands instead of their cards. The biometric system does not map fingerprints. Instead, it uses computer vision and depth geometry to identify each hand, according to the Post.