Amazon Go

What happens when you don't have enough money available to Amazon to cover all the things you grabbed? Do they give you a window to return items before banning you from the store and/or notifying police?

Wonddered the same thing. Also what if you dont want your purchases to end up in the cloud. Can you still pay with cash?

I'm assuming your Amazon Go account is tied to a credit card. In which case, it's not Amazon's problem. They got their money - you now owe your credit card company.

And does paying with cash matter in a store using advanced image recognition? Or do they also use the image recognition to build a profile of the purchaser?

But that card could be maxed out.

if you don't want your purchases to end up in the cloud, probably don't shop at amazon.

Considering there are no cashiers or checkout counters, cash seems like a no-go.

I'm thinking that the easiest/lowest-cost strategy on Amazon's part might be to allow your account to go into the red, and then blacklist you from store access until the debt is satisfied. In most cases this money can be easily recouped later, and they can probably get away with charging an "overdraft fee" of sorts. This would be coupled with clearly stated limits on dollar amount and duration of delinquency before the matter is escalated.

And if your credit card company declines the charges when Amazon attempts to bill them? Then they're out inventory and don't have any compensation. Then it becomes their problem.

What happens if you trash a hotel room?

They charge the credit card you gave them when you checked in.

Maybe they ping the card with a $1 charge every so often to ensure it's at least not cancelled. It could be maxed out in which case they'll likely just give you a negative balance and a time period to pay it. If you don't they can just sell it collections and potentially ban you from the store (it looks like you need to scan your phone to get into the store).

I'd be interested to see if they have manual-fallback in case "the system is down"

In some cases it is still possible to go over a card limit through the way transaction processing works. For instance, when you go to a restaurant and pay in the US they will run the card for the amount of the bill (which may not decline because you have enough $), but you might add a tip on the receipt. The tip will be added to the final charge and taken from your account, potentially making you over the limit. This is usually never stopped but might cause you fees and banking headaches. They may implement a similar procedure like gas stations usually do, by pre-authorizing a fixed dollar amount such as $50 or $100 and sending through the real value to collect after.

What happens if somebody compromises Amazon accounts by the hundreds and hires a shoplifting crew to clean out that store everyday, selling the goods for 1/2 price on the black market.

Retail organized theft is already a major problem here and this is with stores that have F/T security. There is no shortage of drug addicts willing to jack items for $0.10 per $1 retail value, the goods are then exported and sold in China for things like toothpaste, babyfood, ect.

They could do like gas stations and charge a hold just whenever you enter the store then finalize the transaction whenever you leave. That'd solve the problem and if it was going to fail you'd just never be able to enter the store and you'd just see a warning message about your CC not being valid.

This is a strategy you could only accomplish a single time. The losses would be on the order of $10,000 for food only currently on display. you probably wouldnt be able to sell your stock before it expired. and the whole thing would be recorded on camera.

not to mention you'd be arrested for hacking

I assume they will sell non perishable items at some point when this becomes public. I bet there will be security at the doors verifying purchases after the first couple of weeks:

http://www.inews880.com/syn/112/172511/mom-and-pop-bust-reco...

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/11/17/bc-man-arrest...

There's a couple things to prevent this, some really simple and effective. If you've visited the store before they'll have a lot of pictures of your face to compare anyone checking in with your account with. An additional security check when a new phone is added to Amazon Go. Also when an amazon account is used with Go it'll also include a lot of information about the phone it's being used with so our hypothetical group would have to be able to get a large number of anonymous phones or any half decent fraud detection setup would recognize those phones since most other phones will be associated with a single account ever.