These tags are very cheap ~1cent per and can be embedded directly into the clothes stitching.
“I’ll explain later, dear.”
I also wrote a prescient short story, titled "Smart Furniture", published 20+ years ago, where the protagonist's day job was driving past people's houses to scan the tags on the interior, and he considered himself "better" than those folks who stood around in malls scanning the clothing of people as they pass by and accosting them with special offers. The ultimate form of "browser fingerprinting" in a way.
Google themselves has ad offerings making this fairly easy.
Still pretty impressive!
EDIT: I was not even aware of when they had taken my photo.
They already have that large database, those purchases are all already tracked and associated with a customer (to the extent they can depending on context). If you buy something at a major retailer, you'll get a receipt with a transaction number on it, with all the items of course on the receipt; the retailers are usually permanently warehousing that data. The data is text and trivial and gets easier to store closer to active space every day that passes (as opposed to only keeping the huge piles of data on ice; you want it rapidly accessible if you need to always be able to check for any transaction in the past, eg in that scenario of past items coming into the store from who knows when).
Have a friend deposit some clothes in a booth => go get the clothes => checkout with all those clothes for free
Retail theft, in general, is not the problem people seem to think it is.
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).
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).
Pray tell, when did this begin? When was theft at stores, what seems to you the harbinger of societal apocalypse, not an issue in the United States?
Yet here it is, happening under Capitalism. You can't point at a failure of capitalism and say "look, Socialism!!"
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/