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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

#261

Post by kristofferR »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #250
jdietrich wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm actually extremely surprised that volatile prices aren't already common in the US. The grocery chains here in Norway update prices across the country as soon as they notice that competitors sell the same products cheaper (provided they want to be the cheapest for that product), often several times a day. ESLs have been very common in big stores since perhaps 2013.

Our BestBuy alternative Power actually had a big ad campaign last year about how their digital signs and their price robot allows them to offer lower prices than what their competitors offer.

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

#262

Post by PeterisP »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #245
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'...".

And that's a good thing. We should be relieving humans of all kinds of monotonous jobs, which means that yes, we'll not have those jobs, and people won't be able to get this work; and again, that's a good thing - a job isn't some kind of gift or value by itself; if some task isn't intrinsically fulfilling for humans, then we should be working to get humanity rid of such tasks.

Coincidentally, "tasks that aren't intrinsically fulfilling for humans" is pretty much synonymous for work, if it would be fulfilling by itself then quite likely that it'd be or become an unpaid hobby instead of a paid job.

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

#263

Post by xg15 »

PeterisP wrote: post #262
TeMPOraL wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'...".

And that's a good thing. We should be relieving humans of all kinds of monotonous jobs, which means that yes, we'll not have those jobs, and people won't be able to get this work; and again, that's a good thing - a job isn't some kind of gift or value by itself; if some task isn't intrinsically fulfilling for humans, then we should be working to get humanity rid of such tasks. Coincidentally, "tasks that aren't intri…

This is good for bitcon

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

#264

Post by TeMPOraL »

PeterisP wrote: post #262
TeMPOraL wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'...".

And that's a good thing. We should be relieving humans of all kinds of monotonous jobs, which means that yes, we'll not have those jobs, and people won't be able to get this work; and again, that's a good thing - a job isn't some kind of gift or value by itself; if some task isn't intrinsically fulfilling for humans, then we should be working to get humanity rid of such tasks. Coincidentally, "tasks that aren't intri…

I strongly agree, but that's a conditional agreement - I believe we should relieve humanity of the very concept of earning a living, but at the same time we also need to do it in such a way that the whole civilization won't collapse in the proces.

My only complaint in the previous comment is about the PR double-speak. We all know that when a company purchases automation, it's meant to replace human workers. But companies won't honestly admit it.

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

#265

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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.

Or they're doing the "harbor freight" method of having ~3 employees in the store at all times. When there isn't a rush at checkout you actually get good service because under-staffing means people don't specialize so every employee probably knows the answer to your question.

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

#266

Post by mattlondon »

stephengillie wrote: post #216
decker wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience about a 10-15 years ago when I worked in a super-market there was no "back room" really - it was just a staging-post for getting stuff off the truck, putting it onto trolleys, then taking it out onto the shop floor to put on the shelves as quickly as possible.

I dunno if people expect there to be this huge warehouse of stock "out the back" of every supermarket with loads of shelves holding tins of beans or loaves of bread or whatever just sitting there. The shop floor was the "back room"!

I used to just tell folks that what they see is everything we had, so if they cant see it then we dont have it.

Even with fancy modelling and "just-in-time" delivery stock-outs still happen - I remember one year working on the last weekend before Christmas. We "sold out" of turkeys - in reality it was just that people had them in their trolleys and hadn't checked-out yet so people were stealing them out of other customer's trolleys when they weren't looking! Happy Xmas! :-)

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

#267

Post by profalseidol »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #264
PeterisP wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's a good thing. We should be relieving humans of all kinds of monotonous jobs, which means that yes, we'll not have those jobs, and people won't be able to get this work; and again, that's a good thing - a job isn't some kind of gift or value by itself; if some task isn't intrinsically fulfilling for humans, then we should be working to get humanity rid of such tasks. Coincidentally, "tasks that aren't intri…

I strongly agree, but that's a conditional agreement - I believe we should relieve humanity of the very concept of earning a living, but at the same time we also need to do it in such a way that the whole civilization won't collapse in the proces. My only complaint in the previous comment is about the PR double-speak. We all know that when a company purchases automation, it's meant to replace human workers. But compa…

Prof. Richard Wolff proposed solution to this is worker-owned cooperatives. You'll see a lot of his work on this on his books and in interviews and talks.

The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives in Spain, a multi-billion dollar corporation had to cut down employees during the recession. But instead of simply firing people, they were given options including offers to re-skill and compensation (like commute). The whole corporation paid for this. Even in this ultra hostile capitalist world, we've now a case where a large scale cooperative can survive the cycle of capitalistism's overproduction and over-exploitation.

Ofc this is all work in progress, and nobody knows what problems it will face. But certainly we need to do something about the current Capitalism.

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

#268

Post by unabridged »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #246
gonehome wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially Google Maps, I'm waiting for a competitor to blow it out of the water. Satellite images are relatively cheap, you could have a map that shows a daily updated image of every street, and show timelapses. But their streetview would be very tough to displace.

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

#269

Post by empath75 »

mattlondon wrote: post #266
stephengillie wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience about a 10-15 years ago when I worked in a super-market there was no "back room" really - it was just a staging-post for getting stuff off the truck, putting it onto trolleys, then taking it out onto the shop floor to put on the shelves as quickly as possible. I dunno if people expect there to be this huge warehouse of stock "out the back" of every supermarket with loads of shelves holding tins of be…

The exception to this is milk and bread. There’s always more bread and milk in the back.
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