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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

#241

Post by majewsky »

dctoedt wrote: post #33
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.

True; a 20-minute difference would definitely be enough to tip the scales in favor of self-service. But in the grocery stores in our area, there are almost always plenty of registers open and little waiting. So the time requirements being approximately equal, I'd rather pay a skilled cashier and bagger to do the work of speedily "ringing up" and bagging my groceries, while I stand there and chat with them. (As a teen…

I'm still baffled that baggers exist. From my (German) perspective, the entire concept of employing a human just for this task is absurd.

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

#242

Post by eric_h »

linkregister wrote: post #157
timthelion wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean.

Stop sign. I don’t think it’s a good analogy.

Specifically a four way stop, and I'm not sure I agree that it isn't a good analogy. It's an autonomous system (traffic laws) commanding human behavior.

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

#243

Post by JumpCrisscross »

timthelion wrote: post #114
castle-bravo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... because only capitalism has made post-scarcity possible.

The monarchies of the late 19th century were technologically advanced, but that did not stop Europe from adopting democracy in the 20th century. The monastic system was the main scientific institution for over a milenia, both in Europe and China. Only an ignorant person argue that this system developed no new technologies. You say "only capitalism", but what are you comparing capitalism to? In the past 200 years, cap…

> In the past 200 years, capitalism has been the only economic institution in the world

This is not true.

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

#244

Post by majewsky »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #122
irl_zebra wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It kind of saddens me that people have to point to human cashiers as a source of social interaction. Maybe you can find a place where you can be with people who accept that you want to be solitary at times. I attend my local hackerspace for that purpose.

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

#245

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

I love the marketing angle.

Just two days ago, our internal company newsletter announced a purchase of another industrial robot, and the newsletter said it is meant to "help/relieve our employees with doing monotonous tasks". In the office, we all read this and were "yeah, right; what you actually mean is 'let us get rid of those employees who are currently hired for doing those monotonous tasks'...".

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

#246

Post by TeMPOraL »

gonehome wrote: post #45
hk__2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This reminds me of the argument some (now dead) portal page/search engine company made to Larry Page when Larry and Sergey showed off their page rank algorithm. It was basically something like the following: "This is no good - if the search results are too good then people won't stay on our page long enough to see the ads" This is basically what triggered them to start their own company instead of licensing the tech…

Market pressures always lead to quality decay over time. Even with Google - it started with lightweight, quality, bullshit-free search. Look at it now.

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

#247

Post by TeMPOraL »

cgmg wrote: post #222
joe5150 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the answer of course is "less capitalism" not "more drudgery"

What do you mean by 'less capitalism'?

Instead of introducing more friction into the system so that people have jobs (that are essentially pointless), let's make it so that people don't need to have jobs to survive.

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

#248

Post by majewsky »

maheshs wrote: post #232

I think in coming future, human will revolt again this robot bullshit. Human probably won't use items which are fully automated or done by robot.

As an intellectual exercise, please define "robot", especially as opposed to "machine" and "tool".

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

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

magnetic wrote: post #221
gruez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can get around most of that using private browsing. but there's no "private browsing mode" in real life.

Isn't it called "burqua browsing mode"? More seriously, of course it's harder in the offline world, I agree.

It is; regular people in the western world - especially men - aren't generally welcome in a shop when they're wearing face-covering masks, for security reasons.

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

#250

Post by TeMPOraL »

jdietrich wrote: post #98
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.

Shelves need to be checked, faced and re-stocked on a daily basis. Someone is already checking every shelf in the store every day, so the actual labour cost of changing paper price labels is remarkably small. Electronic shelf labels could facilitate dynamic price changes, but this is likely to be highly unpopular with customers. The mere presence of ESLs could imply volatile or manipulative pricing and undermine cust…

> The mere presence of ESLs could imply volatile or manipulative pricing and undermine customer trust.

It definitely does that for me. The heuristic I use in life is very simple - if it can be done and makes economic sense, it will be done. Volatile pricing can be done with electronic signs, and it definitely could seem to make economic sense to some companies.

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