The future is in aisle 7
To keep up with Amazon, retailers are turning to automation — robot janitors and all
While grocery store Muzak tunes play overhead in the baking goods aisle, a small creature is checking on how many pink icing tubes are left on the shelf.
Tally, a robot, works steadily away — blinking its friendly “eyes” on an LED display as you walk past. Floating across the floors at a Giant Eagle near Aspinwall, it keeps track of inventory so its human counterparts don’t have to.
O’Hara-based Giant Eagle only recently introduced a handful of these logistics robots to some of its stores in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron, and more could be coming.
Automation is inching into nearly every facet of retail, according to a 2017 report by Research and Markets, a Dublin, Ireland-based market research firm. By 2023, the retail automation space will be worth more than $18.9 billion.
Pharmacies use automated services to text or call customers’ mobile phones to alert them that prescriptions are ready to fill. Convenience shops in China use facial recognition for checkout. Amazon has introduced a new brick-and-mortar concept that employs hundreds of overhead cameras to make it possible to avoid the checkout process altogether.
Still, as automation and robotic employees join the ranks alongside human coworkers, a debate has surged around employment and the possibility of replacing today’s labor force with artificially intelligent hunks of plastic and metal.
How far will technology go to create efficiencies in retail?
And will those innovations lead to a lack of good-paying jobs?
The efficient superstore
Dog food, Campbell’s soup, laundry detergent and pediatric shakes were all out of stock during an afternoon visit to Walmart’s Natrona Heights location last week.
A robot equipped with a long conveyor belt was helping employees sort out the missing products. Fast Unloader, as it’s called, helps workers more efficiently unload a freight truck filled with up to 3,000 parcels, said store manager Tony Soltis.
“It’s saving workers’ backs,” he said, noting that only one person really has to get into a truck now to move boxes onto the Fast Unloader belt.
And with information about out-of-stock items already on hand — thanks to other automated systems throughout the store — employees can quickly sort out those products needed to replenish the shelves.
That could mean fewer flustered customers leaving the store to find the missing product at Amazon.com — and fewer lost sales. Retailers lose up to $500 billion per year due to out-of-stock items, according to the Robotic Industries Association, an Ann Arbor, Mich.based trade group.
According to IHL Group, a Franklin, Tenn.-based market research firm, 24% of Amazon’s retail revenue comes from customers who first attempted to buy a product elsewhere in person.
Learning from Amazon
Before the days of World’s Richest Man Jeff Bezos, the
founder of online retail giant Amazon was likely just one of the millions of people flummoxed by the wild success of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer and an expert at the logistics of shipping products.
Now, the tables have turned. The closer that retailers can get to Amazon’s efficiency, the more labor and time savings they’ll achieve and the better that customers’ bottom line will be.
Walmart has its eyes set on human-computer cooperation.
About 15 miles away from the Giant Eagle store where Tally scans shelves looking for missing items, Walmart’s own shelf-auditing robot is hard at work. Created by Strip Districtbased Bossa Nova Robotics, this robot — lovingly named “Jeffrey” by coworkers — moves out of the way for shoppers.
At night, a different robot named “BB” autonomously scrubs the floors. It is teal and looks a bit like a Zamboni, but there’s nobody in the driver’s seat. The robot janitor can clean threequarters of the 175,000square-foot store in a single eight-hour session.
That’s especially helpful during winter months when snow boots track in salt and sludge.
Walmart expects to spend about $83 million on remodeling stores to fit the Fast Unloader and to expand the number of stores with these technologies in Pennsylvania, according to data provided by the retailer. More than 40 stores in the state are getting floor-scrubbing robots this year.
Beep beep, I want your job
In April alone, 12,000 people left the retail industry, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the big picture, that’s a slight change, considering 4.9 million people worked in retail as of 2016.
However, a CNBC analysis found that since January 2017, retail has lost 140,000 jobs amid one of the lowest unemployment landscapes in history and growth in most other sectors.
Closures are partly to blame. As of March, at least 4,810 storefronts will have closed this year, according to data from Coresight Research in New York City. That includes Abercrombie & Fitch, Dollar Tree, Charlotte Russe and Kohl’s locations.
Much of that is due to the rise in popularity of online shopping, which has, in turn, led to demand in related industries like trucking. There’s a shortage of more than 51,000 jobs in long-haul trucking, according to the American Trucking Association in Arlington, Va.
Meanwhile, automation is also slicing away at retail jobs, particularly those of cashiers thanks to selfcheckout lanes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is expecting a 1% decrease in those jobs by 2026.
Proponents of in-store technology argue that just because there are losses in a given role doesn’t mean people are actually being displaced.
“It’s creating a lot of interesting job opportunities for people to do robotics management, data analytics, deployment, support and maintenance,” said Brad Bogolea, co-founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, the San Franciscobased manufacturer of the Tally robot.
For the workers sticking around, Mr. Bogolea believes robotic advancements better inform store associates about where they should be spending time.
Auditing shelves by hand, he points out, is timeconsuming and prone to human error. Plus, Mr. Bogolea points out, it’s not as if Tally is physically doing the employees’ current work: the robot doesn’t even have limbs.
The union representing some Giant Eagle workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, sharply disagrees with that assessment.
“Aggressive expansion of automation in grocery and retail stores is a direct threat to the millions of American workers who power these industries and the customers they serve,” UFCW president Marc Perrone said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.
Why can’t we be friends?
Some employees don’t exactly love working side by side with machines.
Anonymous Walmart employees used the social media website Reddit to slam the Fast Unloader automated product-sorting system.
“I’m so overwhelmed and done with this,” wrote one worker going by the screen name glavkopis. After about a week of using the automated system, they wrote, five associates quit and a supervisor decided to step down.
Another user reported low morale. “I hate work so much since this automated belt showed up,” wrote user Maxxjulie. “It’s like I’m working harder but feel like I’m doing less. I’m drinking beer almost every night and suddenly buying scratch off lottery tickets which I never do cuz i know it’s a waste of money.”
It’s safe to say that customers aren’t really bothered, although some at Giant Eagle did notice the Tally robot. They usually just did a double-take before returning to shopping. Some smiled at it.
At Walmart, the floorscrubbing robot BB drew surprised looks, likely because it seemed as if a ghost was operating the cleaner. Some notably kept their distance.
Then again, people used to avoid self-checkout, but now those lanes draw some of the longest lines.