Britain How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
- Thread starter DarthOne
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- automation robots
DarthOne
☦️
I’m not so sure, especially with the rise of ubereats and similar services where your order the food and it’s dropped off. Whose to say that one day you won’t have people going to a sort of ‘drive-through grocery store’? Where people come by, tell or type in what they want and the robots get it for them?
Honestly, I would still go in to pick my perishables for quality. I did an online grocery order and the guy picked the shittiest bananas and chicken I ever saw.
Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
Depends on the culture of the country. Huge wholesaler/big box supermarkets like Walmart and Costco struggled to expand into Japan because people there prefer the small town grocery shopping experience, ie walking up to a stall with fresh fish caught and handling it.
This system might catch on in America if it's profitable. Seems like the business is substituting high labor costs (warehousing has a high turnover rate and you have to spend a lot of money retraining all of those new hires, and you have a lot of laborers) for a lot of technicians and maintenance fees.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I wouldn't be surprised if grocery stores went as low as something like 10% of market share, but some people will just always want to do it in person. As Nemo said, handling produce and the like in person is something of value, and as Val said, some people just have a personal/cultural preference.
If it's cheap and saves labor though, it becoming the dominant model would not surprise me.
Doomsought
Well-known member
If it was possible that huge segments of the job market would disappear just because automation technology makes it possible, then it already would have happened to middle management before you were even born. The technology to automate middle management has existed since the 80s.
Automation expands only with labor scarcity. Any increase in automation in the near future will be the result of Democrats buy votes with free hand outs, not the progress of technology.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
I'll agree that external factors do play a significant role in forcing the adoption of automation; or indeed, any significant change in business. I mean we've had the technology for people to work from home for decades, and yet in Japan, nobody ever considered using it until they were forced to by the pandemic. Human beings despise change in general, but that doesn't change the fact that change is inevitable. Whether it's caused by a labor shortage, or something else; automation will eventually replace people. It's just a question of when.
Bassoe
Well-known member
The other question nobody's been asking, what's to stop someone, unidentifiable under a facemask* from simply looting an all-automated business and running like hell before the human police show up? Especially if there are suddenly an exponentially increasing numbers of potential looters whose employment options and consequentially, opportunities to legally make money, have been eaten by automation.
dv_dt said:
* Everyone's wearing them for covid. What're the police going to do, criminalize such civil responsibility
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Terthna
Professional Lurker
To be fair, there doesn't seem to be much stopping people from looting non-automated businesses these days either; at least, not in Democrat controlled areas of the country.
I was about to say this. Especially in california where it's pretty much legal to steal under $1000 per person per store per day there's been a lot of incidents where groups will just come in, steal a thousand worth of stuff and walk out knowing that the police will not respond. My suggestion that stores might be forced to just go warehouse style where people got their stuff at the door or parking space was met with a lot of anger over on SB. I see it happening though since it solves the massive theft issues, massively helps with stock rotation to keep something expiring a day sooner than the rest from eventually expiring as it's rejected, reducing parking lot needs and facility footprint (massive as land values skyrocket in places not dying off) etc.
Abhishekm
Well-known member
Kinda the main iffy bit about automated shopping. You just know if they could they would pawn off the just shy of being considered bad items off every time.
Bassoe
Well-known member
-cyberpunk vision on-
A couple decades from now, when automation has consumed enough of the labor market that aside from the 1% of the population who're robotics company executives, theft is the only job opening available, this has been deliberately exploited. Megacorporation-owned entirely autonomous stores, kept solvent by regular bailouts from the government's money printer despite their lack of legitimate customers are everywhere and most of the time, while robbing them remains technically illegal and the camera eyes of the robots capture plenty of credible identifying material for persecution, it isn't actually persecuted. Consequentially, everyone but the robotics company executives does it and whenever the goverment wants to arrest someone for unrelated reasons, they've got a ready-made justification available.
-cyberpunk vision off-