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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible idea. I do not believe this, but I was raised around a lot of people who sincerely, devoutly, believe that in the "end times" of the world, a literally Satanic commerce system will require people to buy and sell goods with imprints on their the foreheads or the palms of their hands.[0]

If you think we've faced some goofy religion-driven complaints about stuff in the past, wait until that crowd finds out Jeff Bezos wants them to buy his stuff with the Mark of the Beast (which is how they'll describe it). People will lose their minds about this. I am completely serious.

Even if the idea of the payment system itself has merit, I predict a terribly chilly cultural reception to the idea.

[0]https://biblehub.com/revelation/13-16.htm

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> a lot of people who sincerely, devoutly, believe that in the "end times" of the world, a literally Satanic commerce system will require people to buy and sell goods with imprints on their the foreheads or the palms of their hands

I imagine the overlap between Whole Foods customers and this lot is sparse.

If anything, it sounds like a great opportunity for free marketing.

Well, if this fully launches, I'd expect them to become completely disjoint sets.

But don't for a second believe that the "Satan is coming for us any moment now" crowd doesn't have an awful lot of money and power. I'm not describing a tiny pocket of people who eschew physical possessions, but a rather large portion of the US.

> If anything, it sounds like a great opportunity for free marketing.

Right? I'd shop at Satan's grocery store.

I agree with you; A decision that has nothing to do with them is likely to suffer massive backlash. Because if the world doesn't fit their narrative, they will make it so.

I look forward to it. Not saying it's the best strategic move by Amazon, but day by day i grow more tired of the fallout of christians.

Yea, maybe it's just fringe christians.. but if there are reasonable people in their ranks, they're happily silent. They happily co-exist with extremists, and the affect that's having on society is frustrating to me.

If they just lived their life and didn't try to bully everyone else into alignment with their beliefs i'd be more sympathetic. But the less they get special treatment these days the more "Anti christian" they claim everyone is. As if the secular population is out there attacking them. Equality seems persecution to them.

A lot of it seems to come down to a business decision: how large of a market demographic are we willing to piss off, and how badly? On one hand, if you name a new product after a Roman god, there are likely to be at least some people who are offended that you're using their deities name, but that's probably going to be a teensy amount of people. On another, if you name your new product "Pope Is A Dope", a pretty large chunk of your customer base is likely to take their business elsewhere.

So just purely from a business point of view, Amazon needs to evaluate how much they're willing to annoy evangelicals. It's very possible they've run the numbers and decided they're OK with this for all the reasons you state and more. I think it's also at least a little possible that it simply hadn't occurred to them that some people might not like the idea for religious reasons. If they launched their new "Zeus the Deuce" product and suddenly a few people people rose up and started writing op-eds and organizing boycotts over it, I'd expect someone to be pretty surprised. I think this might be along those lines.

Red Letter Media featured an Asian Christianity tape from long ago that had a bit about how products can't have barcodes on them because it's the number of the beast or some craziness.

https://youtu.be/ceUSZBMeREY?t=2017

I was taught that growing up.

And again, let me be explicitly clear: I do not believe any of this. However, a lot of people genuinely do, right now, today.

Hobby lobby doesn’t use barcodes for this reason

Wow, I thought you were joking. Seems not.

The first thing I thought was “It’s the mark of the beast on the right hand to buy stuff! Good job, marketing staff!”

Right? It seems like their product team either has zero evangelical Christians on staff, or they ignored the people who were probably shouting "this is not going to go over well" in meetings.

Things like this are why it's so critical to have people with diverse backgrounds around you. Otherwise you tend not to know about significant cultural differences until it's too late.

Is there a huge overlap between the types of people who worry about this and Whole Foods customers?

I'm generalizing here, but what I've described is a very common belief among evangelicals. The first source I found on Google[0] puts that at a very large percentage of the population in the US midwest and south.

[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-by-evangelical...

I would not expect that crowd to overlap with Whole Foods customers.

Why? I see this sentiment echoed many times.

Its confusing to me at least because it’s not like Whole Foods has direct competition for high end food stuffs in most markets I’ve seen.

I know a handful of these types people and they are more likely than average to only buy the best foods, with Whole Foods being their major retailer of choice.

I guess I’m assuming from the religious conservatives I know that they wouldn’t be into the organic/hippy/overpriced food market.

There are a not-small number of people who follow Joel Osteen and other "prosperity gospel" preachers who think God would want them to have the very best, and if that means organic/hippy/overpriced, then so be it.

Huh, they might not think of it as hippy/overpriced and more like organic/better. Consider that on this board Dr. Bronner's get routine praise, despite its overtly religious appearances.

Regardless, I'd challenge this assumption.

Do you have a source for it being a very common belief? My wife grew up in the south, I lived there for years, and neither of us have ever heard anyone mention this. It sounds like something you'd read on a "10 crazy things Christians actually believe" article, even though it's not "very common" as you claim it is.

Google "southern baptist mark of the beast".

Personal source: I was raised in the Midwest and attended Southern Baptist (i.e. mainstream evangelical) churches during my upbringing. I was taught that these things are literally true many, many times over the years. I'm not trying to make fun of Christians, Midwesterners, or Southerners, or anything remotely like that. But I am saying that I have personally been told that the Biblical book of Revelations is a set of literally true predictions about the near future.

Walk into any Southern Baptist or Assemblies of God church, find the preacher, and ask them if Revelations is a story of true things that are going to happen, and they're very likely to say that yes, it is. Tell them you heard some guy on the Internet say that the Mark of the Beast is a real thing. They're likely to nod and confirm that yeah, that's what the Bible says.

I'm not saying that everyone in those and other evangelical denominations believe this. I absolutely 100% contend that a whole awful lot of people sincerely do.

I mean, they do sell homeopathic medicine there. It is not that much of a leap.

Cashier security: "Sorry Mr. Null (NULL), looks like your palm isn't scanning, you need to put the items back in this bin."

Cashier security: "Sure.... Sorry Mr. Null (NULL), you will have to work this out with amazon."

The idea itself is not goofy?

So like the vaccine passport?

I mean yes, but those people have believed just about everything from drivers licenses to social security numbers to RFID to the COVID vaccine was the Mark of the Beast. Every new paradigm in communication, every form of government-issued identification, the serial numbers on dollar bills.

It's fun to laugh at their constant stupidity, but also perfectly safe to ignore them from a political and economic standpoint.

maybe some people believe those things, but simply not true to grossly overgeneralize as those people because the bible is pretty clear about the mark of the beast being on the hand or the forehead.

It is the same people taking a vague and cryptic text which was probably originally about Nero Caesar and applying the same flawed pins-and-string conspiracy theory reasoning to a few cherry-picked details in order to express their constant fear of the future. The bible says a lot of things about the mark of the beast that conveniently get ignored whenever evangelicals think they've spotted it, and they think they spot it all the time. They've never been right, and they're never going to be right.

Yeah, the lack of a consistent interpretive hermeneutic for biblical texts is a big cause of this kind of confusion.

Incidentally, there is a lot of scholarly support for the hypothesis that, in context, the forward-looking statements in the book of Revelation (and other New Testament texts) are largely or completely about first-century events (see topics such as preterism, covenant eschatology, full preterism, etc.).

Understanding documents that were written thousands of years ago, in a cultural and linguistic milieu far different than that of western civilization, is difficult for modern westerners. People ought to study more before jumping to outlandish conclusions about the meaning of such texts.

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