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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

#131

Post by improv32 »

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…

Trader Joe's is excellent about this. I'm not sure if it's explicit policy but every single time I've asked an employee where something is they dropped what they were doing, walked over to the exact spot and literally handed me the item I was looking for. I guess that's only possible in a small store though.

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

#132

Post by heartbreak »

improv32 wrote: post #131
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…

Trader Joe's is excellent about this. I'm not sure if it's explicit policy but every single time I've asked an employee where something is they dropped what they were doing, walked over to the exact spot and literally handed me the item I was looking for. I guess that's only possible in a small store though.

Wegmans employees do the same thing, and my Wegmans is bigger than some Walmarts.

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

#133

Post by ISL »

improv32 wrote: post #131
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…

Trader Joe's is excellent about this. I'm not sure if it's explicit policy but every single time I've asked an employee where something is they dropped what they were doing, walked over to the exact spot and literally handed me the item I was looking for. I guess that's only possible in a small store though.

Many stores do this. Our local grocery store, QFC, frequently does it, Home Depot does it, etc.

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

#134

Post by ryandrake »

icebraining wrote: post #106
ryandrake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convenience/efficiency more than anything. Most of the time, human checkout is faster than self-checkout. I can prepare my payment in parallel with the human operating the checkout hardware. I don't have to learn and navigate the touch screen menu system (even if it can be learned in a second, that's one second more than the zero I get with human checkout). Often, self checkout kiosks fail in ways that require a huma…

Prepare your payment? What's there to prepare?

Pull out wallet, extract credit card, swipe or insert chip, wait, sign, put back card, put back wallet. All these things can be done in parallel while the cashier is also working. With self-checkout unless you are very good you can't do this while you are also scanning all your items.

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

#135

Post by heartbreak »

derefr wrote: post #129
comboy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What hospitality robots are you talking about? Does Walmart have hospitality robots? I only saw the stock scanning robot in the article.

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

#136

Post by napa15 »

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…

Yes, I think the social factors are underestimated. I actually believe that most people by default would prefer to interact with a robot rather than with another human. Humans have different speeds, moods, knowledge and expertise. When you shop, you dont do it to have a social experience, you do it to get a very specific job done and in my opinion this makes humans a variable that is desireable to be removed.

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

#137

Post by monk_e_boy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #110
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…

I already choose grocery stores with ample self checkout, which is so much better to me than waiting in line then interacting with a clerk. I for one welcome our robot service providers.

It does raise the question of what jobs are worth saving? So a robot takes someones job, but it was a crappy job that they hated anyway. But they needed the money. Tough.

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

#138

Post by QuadrupleA »

baron816 wrote: post #130

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.

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 things cheaper and thus improve quality of life too, at least if people still have some source of income to afford it).

I'd like to think anybody out of a job can just be smart and entrepreneurial and create some other new value people are willing to pay for, but I'm not sure everyone's cut out for that, or how much interest markets have for most of that kind of stuff. Many more small business fail than succeed. Maybe keeping some dumb, honest jobs around would help keep the balance.

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

#139

Post by radley »

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…

I've almost always had the opposite response, ranging from briefly informative directions to someone guiding me all the way to the item I seek.

(Edit: But I don't shop at Walmart...)

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

#140

Post by sigstoat »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #125
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 e…

> Each store houses about 250,000 unique products.

https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2005/01/07...

"Supercenters average 187,000 square feet, employ 350 or more associates on average and offer 142,000 different items."

> If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely)

looks like they're maybe $10 per on alibaba, in lowish volumes.

> You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)?

they can just go check out any of the many places that already use such tags, and note that they work fine.

> Do those places have wifi access?

> Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

they use 433MHz ISM, and don't screw around with IP networking. here's an example device on alibaba

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wireless-digital-pric...

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

they're used in hazel's in boulder, co. pretty sure i've seen them used in some other stores, though names aren't coming to mind at the moment.

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