Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
I work at a Kroger owned store. For whatever reason they decided to give that another try at my store and another one in the same division. We’re all very sceptical… since you know it already failed before but it’s better than the robot “Tally” which drives around and checks for empty spots on shelves. The poor grocery guys are supposed to then go around and face em despite already being tight on people
The same items at my local Ralphs (Kroger) are constantly (like 4+ years) out of stock because they just face over the holes. Whoever is putting inventory into the computer must absolutely suck too because this shouldn’t even be happening; but having worked at Walmart I’ve seen firsthand how people roll their eyes when the numbers are off.
I’ve been told that it’s mostly automated. IE the Point Of Sale tells the system what items were sold and it subtracts from whatever total it has. The produce guys have said that because of this system some things like bananas are almost always screwed up, cause the barcode and the PLU (the numbers) aren’t actually the same item. Namely sometimes when the banana suppler changes they don’t get automatically ordered cause the system thinks we’re selling the old ones which “don’t exist anymore”. I’d expect similar things happen to grocery and home but to a much less extent, probably from people just tossing stuff out instead of scanning it out and then still just tossing it. Yay food waste.
Ocado! I remember watching a promotional video about this being the future of grocery stores like a decade ago, and always vaguely wondered what happened to it. The whole hive-picker robot-carts-on-rails thing seemed very well developed, but I wasn’t convinced it was really practical.
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814
https://retailboss.substack.com/p/krogers-350-million-lesson-why-big
https://macrohint.com/krogers-2-6-billion-warehouse-meltdown-the-untold-story-behind-the-biggest-automation-failure-in-modern-grocery/
I work at a Kroger owned store. For whatever reason they decided to give that another try at my store and another one in the same division. We’re all very sceptical… since you know it already failed before but it’s better than the robot “Tally” which drives around and checks for empty spots on shelves. The poor grocery guys are supposed to then go around and face em despite already being tight on people
The same items at my local Ralphs (Kroger) are constantly (like 4+ years) out of stock because they just face over the holes. Whoever is putting inventory into the computer must absolutely suck too because this shouldn’t even be happening; but having worked at Walmart I’ve seen firsthand how people roll their eyes when the numbers are off.
I’ve been told that it’s mostly automated. IE the Point Of Sale tells the system what items were sold and it subtracts from whatever total it has. The produce guys have said that because of this system some things like bananas are almost always screwed up, cause the barcode and the PLU (the numbers) aren’t actually the same item. Namely sometimes when the banana suppler changes they don’t get automatically ordered cause the system thinks we’re selling the old ones which “don’t exist anymore”. I’d expect similar things happen to grocery and home but to a much less extent, probably from people just tossing stuff out instead of scanning it out and then still just tossing it. Yay food waste.
Ocado! I remember watching a promotional video about this being the future of grocery stores like a decade ago, and always vaguely wondered what happened to it. The whole hive-picker robot-carts-on-rails thing seemed very well developed, but I wasn’t convinced it was really practical.
Thanks for closing that loop for me.