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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

#331
I suspect this has to do with how Walmart has been ramping up there internet game over the past 1-2 years. They have an API similar to Amazon's for pulling product info and placing orders (it's still in beta last I checked).

Walmart has already started doing the 2 day delivery thing a while ago for free (no "prime" needed) for orders above the purchase threshold. They then started allowing you to order online and pick up in stored (including groceries).

I think we are going to see Walmart start competing with Amazon even harder. And here's the thing most people don't even realize - Amazon's main business unit dealing with retail sales loses a metric shit ton of money. Amazon just released it's latest quarterly report and somehow people thought it was a good report. It wasn't. Sure, Cloud services are doing well. But Amazon as an entire company makes only a 1.3% profit margin. That includes the high margin cloud business. The actual retail business? It loses 18%!!! That loss is up from 15% the previous quarter. In 2013 those losses were 2-4%! Amazon is getting absolutely ravaged in their retail sales business. Walmart, on the other hand, has margins of about 2.35% and pretty much all they do is retail business. And let's not forget that Walmart has massive brick and mortar stores all around the country and they can still turn a profit. Amazon, who has at this time nearly 0 physical retail spaces (other than a few test/trial stores) manages to piss away nearly 1 in every 5 dollars it takes in from their retail unit.

I sincerely think that Walmart is going to figure out a way in the next 5-10 years to utterly decimate Amazon's main line of business.

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

#332

You guys think there will be a backlash to this? Some sort of modern luddite movement? Whenever I shop I refuse to use the self-checkout, you think that sort of thing might spread?

Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?

I DID the cashier job at the store I go to, and am still fairly familiar with the software/hardware. If I could just step up to a normal register and run through my stuff, it would take seconds for me to check out, as it does to check out small orders when you have a cashier who somehow manages to care at $10/hour.

Meanwhile, self checkouts are slow as hell, cumbersome, and double check everything you do, but still manage to not stop theft. Not to mention many purchases need a human in the loop anyway, and the amount of times other shoppers spend ten full minutes also fighting with the things, but without the understanding of the back end POS software, and you could easily replace a group of 4 self checkouts with the one person being paid to watch them anyway

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