Walmart - Mike Mozart

Forty Walmart Locations Now Have Restocking Robot

October 31, 2017         By: Steven Anderson

While we’ve seen quite a bit of change going on at the checkout point for mobile payments to step in on, we don’t think too much about the shelf stocking part of things. Those boxes of Cheerios or whatever don’t just find their way onto shelves; they’re placed there by paid employees. That may not be the case much longer, as Walmart joins Amazon in the robot push thanks to 40 new locations about to receive inventory replenishment robots.

These restock bots have already been piloted in several Walmart locations, and must have produced satisfactory results due to the expansion effort from there. The robots are merely two feet tall, but contain a variety of cameras that allow them to scan aisles and spot holes in inventory, which they can then work to restock.

Word from Walmart’s chief technology officer makes it clear why Walmart’s interested in this development; the robots are 50 percent more productive than their human counterparts, both improving accuracy in inventory and scanning shelves fully three times faster. That by itself is noteworthy enough, but when you couple it on to earlier reports that say self-checkout operations have grown by 67 percent just in 2017, a clear and disturbing trend starts to emerge.

While Walmart’s CTO makes a good point about how humans don’t like to go check on the exact stock of Cheerios in place, I’m fairly sure they’d prefer it to having no job at all. There’s one school of thought that says automating simple tasks like these free up humans for more complex and engaging tasks. It also potentially means mass unemployment.

Do this sort of thing on a wide enough scale, and not only do you have widespread robotics use, but also a potential economic disaster. Automation works well in many fronts; we’ve already seen how mobile payments are automating the checkout process to the point where you don’t even need a checkout stand any more. Go too far with it, however, and you’ve destroyed your own market as no one has a job and can afford products.

Walmart’s move here is a big step toward a loss of the flesh-and-blood worker, and unless it’s handled properly, could be the start of Walmart’s own demise instead of a better competition with Amazon and the like.