Walmart enlists robots to audit shelves
Robots are already a common sight in warehouses, with companies like Amazon using more than 50,000 of them. But now companies are planning to move their robots into stores as well, With Walmart announcing that they are deploying shelf-scanning bots in 50 locations around the United States. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer has been testing shelf-scanning robots in a handful of stores in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and California, but now plans a nationwide rollout.
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The corporation plans to use the machines to check things like inventory levels, prices and track misplaced items. Although robots will help the retailing giant’s bottom line, they claim the introduction of the robots won't lead to job losses in stores. Instead they predict that the robots will save employees from carrying out tasks that are “repeatable, predictable, and manual.” Instead, the company hopes that employees will have more time and opportunities to cater to customers. Aside from just saving workers time, the company plans to use the data they collect to improve efficiency in stores nationwide.
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"If you think about trying to go through a facility with all these different [items] and figure out if your prices are accurate, it can be very time-consuming,” John Crecelius, Walmart’s vice president of central operations, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “From our perspective, when you're doing things like this you're trying to improve your service to your customers and trying to make things simpler and easier for your associates at the same time.”
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The robots themselves will be produced by the California based company, Bossa Nova Robotics. They will be approximately two feet tall and feature an expandable tower that has many lights and sensors for scanning the store shelves. they’re basically rolling gray boxes with a large arm up top that sports on-board cameras. The robots will be sitting in a recharging station in the store, until an employee programs them to complete a task.
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Demonstrating the robots’ usefulness is simple enough, but Walmart’s claim that their deployment won’t lead to job losses is harder to prove. Just because you don’t fire a human the moment you buy a robot, doesn’t mean you won’t hire fewer humans further down the line. And although economists and other forecasters disagree about whether the current wave of automation is going to lead to widespread job losses, at least some studies show that when you get more (industrial) robots in any geographic area, you get fewer jobs and lower wages. Whether or not the same holds true of shelf-scanning bots will no doubt be the subject of future studies.
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For Wal-Mart, the move is part of a broader effort to digitize its stores to make shopping faster. In the past year, it has installed giant “pickup towers” that operate like self-service kiosks and where customers can pick up their online orders. The company has also speeded up the checkout process by allowing customers to scan their own purchases, and it has digitized operations like pharmacy and financial services in stores. Wal-Mart has also been testing drones for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories.
