We know from our reader polls that many if not most of our readers shop regularly or at least sometimes at Walmart. Many visit there while spending the night in their RV in a store parking lot.
If that’s you, then maybe you have recently spotted a six-foot robot moving around a store, pausing to do something you didn’t understand.
The robots are currently deployed in about 350 Walmart stores and should be in another 650 by summer. The machines move on their own. They use their eyes (cameras) to scan shelves, detect out-of-stock items and check for pricing accuracy. The robots don’t resemble something out of a science fiction movie, as you can see in the photo.
If you should bump into a robot, there is no need to say “sorry”: the robot doesn’t care. . .
Walmart recently announced it’s piloting a new technology called Alphabot that’s designed to enable quicker, more efficient picking of online grocery orders at the store level. The system uses autonomous carts to retrieve ambient, refrigerated and frozen items ordered for online grocery shoppers. After it retrieves the products Alphabot delivers them to an in-store workstation, where a Walmart associate checks, bags and delivers the final order.
No plans have been announced yet about replacing human store greeters with robots. Stay tuned.
##RVT931
Robots 🤖 n Walmart taking more people’s jobs! Check our stands with no checker, toll booths without folks!!
Now you wonder why there are increased homeless?!?! Less jobs for people!!
🙁 😢
We HATE the new online shopping systems. Now employees are blocking aisles, blocking access to products with their bulky product picking carts.
Our local Walmart has the so called inventory robots. They are interesting to watch, but the shelves still are not stocked days later. The way the shelves are mismanaged, there is no way to get an accurate inventory. Items on shelves are not in the proper places and the price tags never match the merchandise on the shelves.
The two robots I have seen in the Palm Coast FL and the Ormond Beach FL stores are NOT doing anything as suggested by this article. They are much different looking and frankly they have lots of cameras so they are definitely watching for shoplifters. They are not taking inventory or picking products for customers. There are humans doing that in those two stores.
They need to program robots to pick up trash outside the stores. Unfortunately Walmart and many other stores produce way to much trash that blows around.
The stores are not the ones producing the trash,,, it is the disgusting people that have no respect for anyone else or anything else that is producing the trash!!!
If Walmart can replace your job with a robot they will. The Walmart I used too work at had an automatic floor scrubber. Once they remodeled the store then the store got rid of the tile flooring. No need for overnight associates to buff and wax the floors anymore.
If you demand minimum wage above what the work pays, the robots become more affordable… so Walmart is moving towards the Amazon auto-bot model. Employees will be fired at the register in favor of self-checkout. Employees will be fired as stockers and fired as pickers in favor of robots. When people realize that “shopping” in the brick and mortar robot-warehouse still doesn’t involve interacting with people, it will be converted to a pure warehouse “distribution center” for pure-online. Except, no one can buy anything from them because we’re all unemployed.