Looking at the status of American retail, not a chance. We put chips in credit cards 20 years too late, and to this day in major metro cities plenty of name brand stores have a little scrap of paper taped to the card reader telling you to swipe. No one likes chip readers unless you have a fetish for security, they are slow and fail before the rest of the credit card. Swiping is instant and works with the scrappiest of credit cards, and that's what people prefer when given the choice. Apple pay and other touchless systems are not in heavy use, either, and have also been around for years.

This is an industry with a lot of inertia, and customers are not going to be driving this change like a lot of optimists at amazon might expect. They will struggle when the tech isn't working right and prefer the old ways, as they do now.

Plus there is the rampant theft that will occur, unless you hire someone to stand there and man the door. And at that point you've spent millions on this fancy tech that your shareholders salivated over to have the same exact payroll overhead as you did when you had someone sitting there scanning items.

If this makes amazon and the dime a dozen clone startups some money, good for them, but I don't see this changing the world.