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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

#211

Post by notatoad »

derefr wrote: post #128
monkmartinez wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

>doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

Everything gets stolen. Mostly by employees. When I worked retail somebody got away with a treadmill. Just wheeled out the door on a cart, nobody said a thing. Later I was looking for a treadmill after a customer had checked the online stock count, and the system was off by three, not just the one I knew had disappeared.

The other big problem with the counts is just stuff moving around the store. It's a limited physical space, and it isn't all merchandised according to the book. Un-recorded promo displays get set up, things get moved onto top shelves and departments where they don't belong.

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

#212

Post by hkmurakami »

notatoad wrote: post #167

The 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…

Considering I've actually called stores to check whether they have a particular item in stock or not, I imagine you are not too far off in your hypothesis.

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

#213

Post by seanmcdirmid »

DougWebb wrote: post #196
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a generic end-of-work question. Ideally, everyone would have jobs they liked, and all the dull stuff would be automated (Star Trek outcome). Pessimistically, the machines will become better than humans at everything and we will just become obsolete (Terminator outcome). If automation picks up, we will have to deal with these questions sooner rather than later, but it will happen eventually.

Let's be optimistic and hope for the Wall-E outcome instead of the Terminator outcome. The robots will keep us around and take care of us as pets.

Erm, if we create robots better than us, they are our legacy, our homo superious, why should Homo sapiens continue? You don't see Neanderthals running around today for a good reason.

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

#214

Post by hkmurakami »

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…

That's if you can first locate a warm body in your geographical vicinity in the first place.

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

#215

Post by nitrogen »

guelo wrote: post #185
torgoguys wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Walmart actually used to list exact shelf location for items on their site. Maybe they still do, maybe desktop only?

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

#216

Post by stephengillie »

decker wrote: post #189
notatoad wrote: post #167

The 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.

It's traditional to spend 45-180 seconds in the back room, staring at your phone or talking to a coworker, before returning to the sales floor to tell the customer that you're sold out. It's like the Hello World of stocking product.

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

#217

Post by coderdude »

decker wrote: post #189
notatoad wrote: post #167

The 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.

It's not simple or well-defined from a technical (programming/tech) standpoint but you're right that a person would feel that way.

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

#218

Post by sgustard »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #27
meddlepal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel that way about bank tellers (having been a former bank teller a long time ago...) then I realized I was wasting 20 minutes in line for a simple deposit that the machine could do in under two minutes without a queue.

Don't you feel a tinge of guilt when you walk in one day and now there's only two tellers instead of three? Maybe I'm just weird but I was at target yesterday and there were only three aisles open with lots of people going to self checkout. I said fuck it and waited in line for a person.

I refuse to feel guilty, but I'm happy to blame the large soulless corporation that created this moral dilemma for me in the first place. I didn't fire those people. I don't eat at McDonald's anymore because I want to stay alive for a while, but I'm not going to feel guilty about their workers either. I'll admit standing in line for my robot checkout while idle cashiers stare at me with forlorn sad eyes makes me uncomfortable. And yet I have no issue taking money from an ATM even though there's a building full of money-counting humans behind it.

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

#219

Post by nitrogen »

jdietrich wrote: post #171
IIAOPSW wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this has to do with demographics. We prefer to deal with robots and order stuff on web interfaces. I was talking with my aunt and uncle the other day. They were telling me that they prefer to bring their paper checks to the bank and interact with the teller rather than scan it in the app from the comfort of their home. That blew my mind. I think there's a huge age gap when it comes to preference for human vs…

Robots aren't going to replace all of the service jobs, but I think they're going to replace more than we might imagine. Over the last 30 years, more than half of bank branches in the UK have closed. Many older customers have been substantially inconvenienced by these closures, but they're on the wrong side of economics. Beyond a certain point, it's just no longer financially viable to keep a branch open. A lot of ol…

There's good reason to prefer a disc over a stream, especially if you use player software that lets you skip the unskippable previews. The audio is better, the bitrate is higher, and you can rip the disc and store it somewhere safe.
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