As many replies have stated, retail theft is already trivial RFID or not.
When I was in university, a roommate made it a habit of ringing out several pounds of alcohol as celery in self checkout on a monthly basis. They got caught after years of this behavior. Probably thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands in theft. Their only punishment was a slap on the wrist (don't come back to this specific store).
Why not? People are walking into stores with bags, throwing as much as they can in and then walking out just fine. All in broad daylight. What is amazon doing that will prevent that?
The current traditional way of shoplifting is to just walk out the front door. Employees are (properly) instructed to never attempt to stop the criminal, and unless the criminal steals thousands of dollars of merchandise the retailer most likely won't bother to call the police unless the person is doing it multiple times at the same store.
It's a national epidemic in the US and is presently thrashing just about every major retailer. Huge store changes are coming because of that this decade and it'll be ugly.
Amazon can photograph/record the criminals all they want, stores already do that. If they try to stop the criminals from leaving, they're setting up a hyper dangerous violent confrontation scenario with the criminal and the customers still in the store (you do not want that under any circumstances, you want to just let the criminal go). Amazon will do the obvious thing and not stop the criminal after a few customers get murdered in the store from a thief that flips out after getting 'caged,' if they're dumb enough to try to stop them (and or Amazon gets a few customer hostage scenarios). Nobody in power in US urban areas gives a shit about any of this any longer, the US is collapsing in the style of a Latin American Socialist paradise (see: Los Angeles rail thefts). No laws, increasing corruption, and it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. Strip mine the US for the $$$ and get the hell out, that's all it's good for now, and the clock is ticking on that (inevitable far higher taxes in exchange for nothing better (the higher taxes are just to pay for past spending mistakes, debt, at this point) + value debasement from USD Fed damage will considerably erode that equation's effectiveness over the next ~20 years).
Exactly, Amazon’s tech is aptly named “Just walk out shopping” [0]
I don’t think people will engage in shoplifting in these types of stores, since you give a lot of personal information through your Amazon account, which would facilitate prosecution.
[0] http://justwalkout.com/
When I was in university, a roommate made it a habit of ringing out several pounds of alcohol as celery in self checkout on a monthly basis. They got caught after years of this behavior. Probably thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands in theft. Their only punishment was a slap on the wrist (don't come back to this specific store).