Amazon One’s palm-scanning technology has a huge potential as a versatile tool for businesses. As such, the multinational tech company has finally decided to use the identity service to verify customers’ ages in bars. According to Dilip Kumar, Vice President of AWS Applications, this should further boost convenience in business services and customer experience.
“Verifying a customer’s age for every alcohol purchase is a known friction point for retailers, bars, and breweries,” Kumar wrote in the blog post this Monday. “It leads to longer transaction times and puts a strain on employee productivity. Amazon One’s age verification capability addresses these challenges and alleviates the burden—and time—of manual ID verification.”
Interested individuals can use the system by signing up for Amazon One and scanning their palms at different locations where the service is available. Thankfully, over a hundred Whole Foods Market stores, Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, and various third-party stores already use Amazon One, so there should be multiple options for customers to scan their palms.
According to Amazon, once the customer’s details are available in Amazon One, the bartender will be able to view a “21+” message and a selfie photo for a visual match when the customers scan their hands the first time at the bar. After identity confirmation, a second scan will be required to pay for the purchase.
The idea sounds impressive since conventional age verifications in bars will require employees to ask their customers to present their IDs, which is kind of inconvenient. Thankfully, Amazon One, as a contactless system, should get rid of this process. However, according to Amazon, the age identification feature will first be tested in Coors Field baseball stadium in Colorado, but added it “will be rolled out to additional establishments in the coming months.”
