If you read the article carefully, no one is suggesting banning what you propose (though a machine that makes exact change at checkout seems better).

The article is clickbait.

That is reasonable but it might also be more than Amazon's willing to bear. It costs money to handle cash and it's more work to stock and flush these machines. Amazon may have a business case for these stores that depends on paying the relatively small merchant fee to credit card networks and knowing that they don't have any burden of handling any cash.

People who avoid banking by choice will might not go for a card to load cash with. To them, that's going to look like a bank.

> the practical solution is to pass a law requiring them to have a machine to load a card with

This wouldn't work with Amazon's grab-and-go vision. If someone loads $5 of cash on a card and walks out with $20 of product, what do you do?

Same thing as when someone walks in with no cash or card and walks out with $20 worth of product, probably.

AFAIK these stores employ security/loss-prevention (and stockers as well, just not cashiers). There’s people at the door in the videos I saw. How do they stop people from stealing?

Security is enforced inbound. You can't enter without an account. You can grab "anything" you want and it's charged to the account.

They'd only ban cashless stores, if Amazon would offer the option you suggest, they wouldn't be cashless anymore, and therefore allowed.

Typical Silicon Valley Catholic Church-style moral scorched Earth approach.

Could you please not post this kind of flamebait and comment substantively instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html