Palm Payment Trials Are Now Starting in Starbucks

With the recent uptick in AI-related news, it’s no surprise that many companies are attempting to keep up with the current booming tech market. Just last month, Panera Bread started trialing Amazon One, a contactless payment system using that palm of your hand that Amazon started in 2020, across various locations. According to TechCrunch, it was the first restaurant to use the palm reading payment software and followed Whole Foods’ launch with the system in August 2022. Now, Starbucks is the next company trialing the system.

Per The Spoon, the trials are taking place in the Seattle market, North of the company’s headquarters in Edmonds, Washington. The Spoon attempted to use the software by signing up for Amazon One in the store through a kiosk, but users can also pre-enroll online. The registration process took about two minutes, according to The Spoon — they also posted a video showing how the palm transaction works.

“The kiosk prompted me to scan the barcode within the Starbucks app on my phone to identify my Starbucks account and recognize my form of payment,” Michael Wolf, the reporter, wrote in the article. “From there, it asked me to hover both my left and right palms above the scanner, one after the other.”

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This also isn’t the first time Starbucks and Amazon have done a store collaboration. In New York City, Starbucks opened a cashless store in 2021 using Amazon Just Walk Out — a “new shopping experience” that “lets consumers enter a store, grab what they want, and get going.”

Wolf also noted Amazon One’s Terms of Use, which noted it would store his palm signature and that it may be stored on servers outside of the country. The terms also state it does not “otherwise collect your biometric data without your consent.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this will result in an expansion of the Amazon One systems in Starbucks’s nation-wide, as well as if other companies will choose to implement the same software or other forms of contactless payment as well. Until then, here’s a list of locations where Amazon Ones are located across the country — if you’re curious.