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Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

businessinsider.com

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Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#121

Post by [deleted] »

jdietrich wrote: post #95
JSONwebtoken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the foreseable future, robots and chatbots will be poorer UX than speaking to a human. Since it's not adding value to their product it's obviously being done for cost cutting and scale reasons.

I rarely get useful assistance in large chain stores. Asking "where is the pesto?" usually gets an answer like "I dunno, somewhere in aisle 7 maybe" with an indifferent shrug. I'd happily make three attempts at using a clunky voice interface if I got the answer "Aisle 7, bay 11, shelves 3 and 4. We have 18 different kinds of pesto currently in stock. Would you like me to take you there?" It almost seems too obvious t…

[deleted]

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#122

Post by AnimalMuppet »

irl_zebra wrote: post #10
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #8

You guys think there will be a backlash to this? Some sort of modern luddite movement? Whenever I shop I refuse to use the self-checkout, you think that sort of thing might spread?

Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?

I'm not the one you're asking. But I work with computers all day. Even for an introvert, human contact is nice every once in a while. So I use the human cashier. S/he may be less efficient than self checkout, but the self checkout machine never smiles at me...

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#123

Post by derefr »

foota wrote: post #112
jdietrich wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely get useful assistance in large chain stores. Asking "where is the pesto?" usually gets an answer like "I dunno, somewhere in aisle 7 maybe" with an indifferent shrug. I'd happily make three attempts at using a clunky voice interface if I got the answer "Aisle 7, bay 11, shelves 3 and 4. We have 18 different kinds of pesto currently in stock. Would you like me to take you there?" It almost seems too obvious t…

An aisle number is all I'm really looking for when I ask imo. I can scan a shelf about as fast as I can walk.

But if I’m asking, it’s because I already looked on the shelf and I didn’t find the thing after looking for at least five minutes. I want to know, at that point, whether they carry the thing at all; whether it’s just in a crazy place (e.g. honey in the bakery in a little spreads display, instead of in the baking or condiment aisle); or whether my eyes are failing to do their jobs properly and I’ll need to look again.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#124

Post by [deleted] »

phyzome wrote: post #66

> The robots are designed to free up store employees' time so they can use it to help customers. ...which is bullshit; Walmart just doesn't want the "robots taking our jobs" angle here. If they consider the current level at which employees help customers in the aisles sufficient, then they'll be cutting jobs to match that level rather than "freeing up" employees to do more of it.

[deleted]

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#125

Post by SamuelAdams »

kristofferR wrote: post #65

Judging from the pictures they'll still use paper price labels. Why? It seems extremely arcane to still use paper price labels in 2017, especially for stores as big and centrally run as Walmart. With digital price labels you can update prices centrally across the whole country within seconds, and it costs basically nothing to implement too, when the labor cost of manually updating paper price labels are factored in.

>it costs basically nothing to implement too,

Eh. Don't be so sure of this.

Yes, this technology exists. No, it's typically not feasible to implement. The ROI simply doesn't make sense.

Each store houses about 250,000 unique products. That means you'll need that many digital price tags. If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely), thats 1M per store - and that's only in the new hardware.

You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)? Do those places have wifi access?

Then you need to test and update the wireless infrastructure. Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

Then update whatever software exists to send out price updates. This is honestly the cheapest part, all things considered. And it can be applied to the whole chain / store by store, depends on the roll out strategy.

All in all, it's at least 1 million per store. A brand new store costs the same amount. So you'd also be paying for the opportunity cost of not opening a new store. So you'd also lose out on the potential revenue of that new store.

There's other factors to consider, but the math never shakes out positively. There are bigger fish to fry than price tags.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#127

Post by michaelkeenan »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #14
irl_zebra wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?

People need those jobs so I want them to exist.

The 18th century version of this was not using an umbrella to preserve demand for coach drivers:

"Over the years, Hanway and his umbrella fell victim to all sorts of abuse from Brits he passed on the sidewalk. The most pernicious abuse came from an unlikely source: coach drivers. In England at the time, hansom cabs (two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriages) and sedan chairs were the primary modes of transportation. Business boomed especially on rainy days, as both hansom cabs and sedan chairs came equipped with small canopies that kept passengers dry. When it rained, Londoners flocked to these coaches, so Hanway’s umbrella represented a threat to business.

Fearing an interruption in their personal incomes, many hansom cab drivers and sedan chair carriers grew violent toward Hanway. According to the British history magazine Look and Learn, when they saw him walking by, they often “pelted him with rubbish.” On one occasion, a hansom cab driver even tried to run Hanway over with his coach. Hanway reacted by using his umbrella to “give the man a good thrashing.”" - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-public-shaming-of-...

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#128

Post by derefr »

monkmartinez wrote: post #97
woobar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search) Just got from Lowes and they do it on the web and in their app. Search for an item, and if it is in stock it will show you its location on the store map. OTOH, every Walmart I've visted is unable to keep their shelves full. [1] How hard it is to keep something non-perishable (like deodorant) in stock? Somehow Target figured that out. [1]…

Anecdote time! I bought a water softener at HomeDepot about three weeks ago. Initially went to my local Lowes where I had checked if one was in stock and at the store. Yes and Yes. Get to Lowes and there is no water softener, as the website indicated. Lowe's employee checked the back as well, wasn't there. There are many problems with humans doing this "inventory business" at $10 an hour or so. The professional count…

You’d think it’d be a simple matter of 1. automatically decrementing a counter when the item is scanned at checkout; and 2. manually decrementing the same counter when you throw things out for breakage or expiry (i.e. pretend the dumpster is a customer and ring up its purchases.)

That would just leave theft, which is usually predictable with ML (this being part of what loyalty cards are for), and doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#129

Post by derefr »

comboy wrote: post #19
Isamu wrote: post #2

> the robots are 50% more efficient than a human doing the same task. They can also scan shelves three times more quickly and are a lot more accurate. Human employees can only scan shelves about twice a week. Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search) Walmart is testing a robot from Bossa Nova (Pittsburgh and SF) http://www.bossanova.com/ https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/boss…

Why does it have to be a robot riding around? Couldn't the same thing be done from a camera on the ceiling?

The more interesting question to me is why the robot has to go scan the shelves at the time you ask, when there could just be one (purpose-built) robot that walks the shelves once per night and builds up a model of the entire store that gets used by the other robots for the rest of the day. The hospitality robots wouldn’t even need to be able to see the shelves; they’d just need to be able to guide themselves to the right coordinates in the store and say “it should be right in front of me.”

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#130

Post by baron816 »

I wonder how many more jobs you would restore by taking away the original retail robot: the cash register. If you just made employees record all sales by hand in a ledger, companies like Walmart would have to hire thousands or millions more people to check out customers. Think of all those beautiful jobs! That would surely make America great again.
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