Yes, Give Your Fingerprints to Amazon for a Slightly Quicker Checkout at Whole Foods

Hands could be the new credit card at Whole Foods

In Amazon’s vision of the future, customers could soon be using body scans as a payment method in Whole Foods stores. The tech and retail giant is currently testing a system called “Orville” that allows Amazon Prime users to scan their hands to ring up a purchase, the New York Post reports. Orville is reportedly being tested on Amazon employees at vending machines in the company’s New York offices, with the goal of rolling out the biometric technology in a handful of Whole Foods stores by the beginning of next year, per the Post.

This hand-scanning system would supposedly speed up checkout times, with a transaction reportedly taking less than 300 milliseconds compared to the three to four seconds it takes to swipe a card. But would customers really be willing to sacrifice their biometric data to the corporate behemoth that is Amazon just to save a little time? People are already doing it at airports to get through TSA slightly quicker than they can with PreCheck, so there’s not many limits on what we’ll do for convenience. Though friendly reminder that Amazon shares user data with the government, and the compromising of biometric data like fingerprints would be dire if the company gets hacked — all just to avoid waiting in line a few minutes longer each shopping trip.

And in other news…

• Denmark is the first country to ban the fluorinated compounds known as PFAS, which line food containers like fast-casual fiber bowls and don’t biodegrade naturally. [Quartz]
• A new lawsuit claims that the American chicken industry is conspiring to keep wages down for a largely immigrant workforce. [Bloomberg]
• Grocer Kroger is asking customers to no longer openly carry firearms into its stores, following Walmart’s announcement that the megastore chain would discontinue sales of ammunition for handguns and some assault-style rifles. [Reuters]
• Ben & Jerry’s newest ice cream flavor is inspired by structural racism in our broken criminal legal system. [Fast Company]
• Krispy Kreme tests America’s appetite for PSL with a limited-run cheesecake-filled autumn doughnut. [People]
• The movement to bring the ancient grain teff to the U.S. [LA Times]
• In a very strong douche move, Diplo flew to Burning Man on a Popeyes plane with a bagful of Popeyes chicken sandwiches (which, in case you haven’t heard, are temporarily discontinued). [SFist]
• A Scottish distillery has produced the “world’s first Brussels sprouts gin.” Has science gone too far? [Food & Wine]
• Italian tennis player Matteo Berrettini claims that pasta is the secret to his success. I’m sure that’s it!! [ESPN]
• José Andrés is on the ground in the Bahamas and plans to serve 10,000 meals to victims of Hurricane Dorian. [@AC360/Twitter]
• Executives of Waffle House, whose restaurants close so rarely that FEMA uses the chain as a barometer for the severity of a storm, are pictured monitoring the hurricane:

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]