I arrived in Seattle today by light rail. I simply walked on and rode to downtown without interacting with a ticket agent or conductor. It wasn’t until the end of the day that I realized my money clip had never left my pocket.
I met up with my friend John at lunchtime. We signed onto the wait list using a notepad at the front of the restaurant. When our table was ready, I received a text message, and we proceeded to the host stand. Payment for our lunch was done using Google pay. We simply held our phones over the UFC device and it charged half the bill to each of us.
After lunch, John took me to his office, and I was granted entry by entering my name and email onto a screen which printed out a temporary guest badge so that I could go to the rooftop of his building with him. He had a meeting to attend so after grabbing some free coffee from the employee lounge, I headed out to check out Seattle’s new waterfront, an evolution created since the destruction of the elevated freeway that has been replaced by an underground tunnel.
John suggested I see the Amazon Globes so I headed north, and after traversing through Pike Place market, I arrived at Amazon’s new headquarters in the revitalized South Lake Union neighborhood. This is an area dominated by Amazon and other high tech firms who have gentrified only the cars from the day parking lots that used to litter this area.
As a non-employee, I could only gain access to the first floor of the Globes, but after I departed, I stumbled upon the Amazon Go store. This is a place where you scan your phone to enter and then walk out without passing through a cashier line. Somehow the store tracks your movement and the things you remove from the shelf and bills your Amazon account once you walk out the door.
How this happens is a mystery to me. I can possibly understand how the store tracks an item like the can of wine I put in my coat pocket, but how they track the apple and banana I put in my day pack I can’t begin to imagine. At this time, I haven’t actually received a bill so I may have just participated in regulated shoplifting. Theoretically, though, it’s an interesting concept in shopping.
You scan your phone as you enter the electronic turnstile; you grab whatever things you want, and you walk out. There are no registers or scanners. Somehow the whole thing is electronically monitored, in theory anyway.
To return to my hostel, I again pulled out my phone and purchased a transit ticket electronically. I hopped on the streetcar and rode it to my neighborhood. Like all the other transactions of the day, this would be billed to my credit card, with a balance that is set to be paid in total each month out of my checking account.
When I was young, I remember my mom speaking skeptically of a cashless society, but I am thrilled to be able to travel without travelers checks or foreign currency; nothing but my phone really can take me everywhere I want to go.