Comment by bastawhiz
I've always wondered what the play was with these. I can tap my card. I can tap my phone. I never leave home without either of those. I can't use Amazon One online, it's purely a retail thing. I need the thing it's replacing in order to onboard. So... Why?
If this came around on 2010, it would have been a hit. Maybe even 2015. Now, it's simply redundant, or something more nefarious (but I can't imagine how).
Wasn't it obvious? One of Amazon's founding focuses was "make it stupidly easy to pay us." They went overboard to make it easy to buy things. The most obvious is their infamously patented "one click" purchasing, but there were lots of other things. For example, in the early days, they would let you create as many accounts with the same email address as you wanted because "sorry, an account with that email already exists" was an error that might keep you from purchasing.
The Amazon stores were the ultimate physical expression of this ideal. Walk into a store, pick up what you want, wave your hand vaguely at a scanner, leave. If they could have reliably gotten your ID without your involvement at all, they would've done that instead, but the hand scanner was the closest they could come.
There's nothing malicious about it. They just want you to be able to consume as easily as possible with as little friction or opportunities for second thoughts as possible.