Earlier quoted context omitted.
> http://www.bossanova.com/ Oh no, it's _ugly_!
I don't think it's that bad. It's meant to be practical and inoffensive rather than especially stylish.
If, at least, it could have been offensive!
Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
181–190 of 332 posts
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Do you go down this rabbit hole? What requires me to go all the way down the rabbit hole? Everybody has moral beliefs that they don't follow to their extremist conclusions. I see people getting laid off or turnover being allowed to happen - I see that the replacement job for a cashier gig is sometimes even worse - I do my little part to make society a little less bad. I also don't feel that pure individualism is rea…
Nobody wants to be a cashier for 8 hours a day though. The only reason we see losing your job to automation as a negative is because our welfare and education systems are broken. All you're really doing is creating more pointless work to treat the symptoms.
>All you're really doing is creating more pointless work to treat the symptoms.
If pointless work is the best we've got that's fine by me just as long as someone's getting paid on the other end.
Besides if you're sick and know you won't be cured for quite a while you might treat the symptoms as well. Treating the symptoms isn't bad as long as we don't forget to also treat the cause.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#183I 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.
You jest, but I actually wonder sometimes if this type of thing would be better for society. The dream of automation and technology was always to "let the machines do the work so we're free to enjoy life and pursue our dreams" but in a capitalist economy it ends up benefiting the owners of the machines primarily, like Walmart and Amazon, not necessarily society at large (though obviously they enable people to buy thi…
the answer of course is "less capitalism" not "more drudgery"
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Do you go down this rabbit hole? What requires me to go all the way down the rabbit hole? Everybody has moral beliefs that they don't follow to their extremist conclusions. I see people getting laid off or turnover being allowed to happen - I see that the replacement job for a cashier gig is sometimes even worse - I do my little part to make society a little less bad. I also don't feel that pure individualism is rea…
My comment is sassy, but I really was curious about the answer to the question.
My answer is self-evident. I go partway down the rabbit hole. However deep "refusing to use the self-checkout" is.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#185Earlier 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…
I have the opposite experience. Pretty much any store around here, Walmart included, the employees are very willing to help you find stuff, and if they don't know where something is, they will find or call to an employee that does know.
Item location could be provided by a phone app today. My feeling is that they don't do it because they don't want you to know the exact location because they want you to browse the aisles in hopes that you'll throw something into your cart that you weren't planning to. Same reason that supermarkets put milk and eggs at the farthest corner away from the door.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#186> 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…
>> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)
If you search an item in the Walmart mobile app, it will tell you the aisle that the item is in, in the store you are in (there is an automatically-entered "store mode" that is driven by location detection.)
They have all the data across 5,000 stores and >100,000 SKUs. The robot helps ensure that customers haven't moved items from where they are supposed to be.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's that bad. It's meant to be practical and inoffensive rather than especially stylish.
If, at least, it could have been offensive!
They missed a perfect opportunity to give it legs and have it clomp around the aisles muttering "gonk... gonk..."
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#188> 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…
> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search) Isn’t something Walmart doesn’t want you to have? Having a mapping means being more efficient when shopping in the store, which means less time in it and so less opportunities to buy things.
Walmart's core customer personas are "busy moms" - they know that, in the long term, providing mom with convenience, efficiency, and low prices wins over trying to force her to waste time lost in the store.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#189The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs. humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item. that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in…
It's probably because stock checking is a simple repetitive task that humans tend to fail at due to boredom and mental fatigue while robots would accel at it because of the fact that it's simple, well defined and boring.
Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
#190The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs. humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item. that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in…
Stock checking seems vastly easier to accomplish electronically (a la RFID tags) than with dedicated robots.