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This is totally a real problem. I just celebrated my grandmother's 90th birthday. She still lives independently and regularly goes shopping. She doesn't own a mobile phone, let alone a smart phone.

In a world where services that require phones are dominant, choice narrows for elderly and low income persons.

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There's a lot of ways around the broken/lost/phone-less populations in a system like this. The phone doesn't really do any more than provide the initial authentication and receipt delivery. If these really took off and started replacing normal systems it'd be really easy to add a receipt printer and to add a card reader for a 'members card' that does the same thing as the QR code on the phone.

Old people were never going to use this service anyway and already don't use self checkouts. But that's a small population that is only shrinking.

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