And it continues .... Walmart is sugar coating it but this will definitely allow them to reduce employee headcount

Walmart plans to add thousands of robot helpers to U.S. stores
Julia La Roche

vid at source

The robots are coming to the world’s largest big-box retailer.

This year, Walmart (WMT) plans an aggressive expansion of technology that will automate a range of low-level tasks within its fleet of U.S. stores, freeing up its associates to do more specialized work.

The plan is to roll out 1,500 new autonomous floor cleaners, called the "Auto-C," 300 additional shelf scanners dubbed the "Auto-S.” In addition, 1,200 more FAST Unloaders will automatically scan and sort items from trucks, and 900 more pickup towers are expected to retrieve customers’ online orders.

It means that shoppers might soon encounter robots gliding up and down the retailer’s aisles, scanning for inventory, maneuvering around shelves, and scrubbing the store's expansive floor space.

Walmart has embraced new technologies like robots, in order to complete more mundane tasks normally assigned to floor workers. Meanwhile, the roles assigned to its associates are evolving in the changing retail landscape.

In particular, the rise of e-commerce has transformed the expectations of customers, shaping how the company operates inside its stores, affecting everything from inventory accuracy to the shopping experience.

Walmart’s move comes as autonomous technology is slowly infiltrating low-wage service sector jobs. However, a senior Walmart executive explained that the robots are meant to work alongside their human counterparts, as they take on different roles akin to personal shoppers for the retailer's expanding online grocery offering.

John Crecelius, senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. central operations, told Yahoo Finance in a phone interview that the robots will operate a lot like smartphones.

"They are assistants to help you be more effective in taking care of what the customer needs to give you time to serve and sell,” he said.



Freed from ‘tedious’ work

For example, Walmart’s Auto-C autonomous floor cleaner is currently operating in over 200 stores. It uses autonomous technology to clean and polish floors—a task that would typically take two hours for associates to complete each day using a scrub machine.

As a result, the associate responsible for riding the scrub machine now has more time to do "more detailed cleaning," according to Crecelius.

"If you look up under one of our racks out there, you're going to find product, and you're going to find floors that need to be cleaned underneath the racks,” he said.

The additional robotic help is “allowing us to do that and restrooms, and some of the other finer details that might have taken longer to get to in the past,” Crecelius added.

Elsewhere, the Auto-S shelf scanner, currently available in around 50 stores, frees associates from the "tedious" work of going up and down aisles, scanning inventory.

"If you're standing in front of a shelf in one of our stores it's really hard to identify all the issues that need to be addressed. So doing it can be very...tedious and very challenging," Crecelius said.

Auto-S scans shelves for out-of-stock items, misplaced merchandise, and wrong or missing labels. They also provide a blueprint for associates to address different issues faster and more effectively.

"Just getting, 'Here are the things that need to be addressed' and seeing progress when you're addressing those things, feeling progress as you're addressing those things, and your customers getting the things that they need as part of their basket just feels better," the executive said.

‘180-degree shift’

Meanwhile, in the back of the store, the FAST Unloader, currently active in over 300 locations, automatically scans and sorts product unloaded from trucks based inventory needs and departments.

"For a store, the morale, the turnover, the ability to attract people to do that role it is night and day. It's a 180-degree shift," Crecelius said of the FAST Unloader.

Overall, the automated personnel are handling “very mundane and repetitive” tasks where turnover is high, Crecelius told Yahoo Finance.

“So the fact that you're putting this equipment in that takes some of that out, and makes it easier and gives you time to get back on the floor and stock,” will benefit Walmart’s human workforce, he said.

Also, the robot help has some entertainment value: It’ll play music, too.

“Some of those little things go a long way. It just makes it a lot more fun job,” Crecelius added. “It's easier for us to attract people to do the job."

SOURCE

And another swath of jobs is about to disappear ...

Say Goodbye To Cashiers: Walmart Store Switches To Self-Checkout Only
Julie Hambleton

Whether you’re shopping at the grocery store or picking up McDonald’s on the way home, you can choose to see a cashier or simply go through the self-checkout. Walmart, however, may be moving toward a future where that choice is made for you. Starting in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the company is experimenting with a self-checkout-only model. If it goes well, more locations may make the switch.

Walmart Might Switch To All Self-Checkout

A Walmart in Fayetteville, Arkansas is testing using self-checkout machines only. Instead of cashiers, there will be self-checkout hosts at the front of the store to ...

https://secretlifeofmom.com/walmart-swi ... kout-only/

I heard many farriers were unemployed.

The VCR factory isn't even hiring ...

The Robots Are Coming. Is Your Firm Ready?

If you’re worried that robots are coming for your job, you can relax — unless you’re a manager.

A new survey-based study explains how automation is reshaping the workplace in unexpected ways. Robots can improve efficiency and quality, reduce costs, and even help create more jobs for their human counterparts. But more robots can also reduce the need for managers.

The study is titled “The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms.” The co-authors are Lynn Wu, professor of operations, information and decisions at Wharton; Bryan Hong, professor of entrepreneurship and management at the University of Missouri Kansas City’s Bloch School of Management; and Jay Dixon, an economist with Statistics Canada. The researchers said the study, which analyzed five years’ worth of data on businesses in the Canadian economy, is the most comprehensive of its kind on how automation affects employment, labor, strategic priorities, and other aspects of the workplace.

Wu recently spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about the paper and its implications for firms. (Listen to her full interview in the podcast at the top of this page.)

More Robots, More Workers

Contrary to popular belief, robots are not replacing workers. While there is some shedding of employees when firms adopt robots, the data show that increased automation leads to more hiring overall. That’s because robot-adopting firms become so much more productive that they need more people to meet the increased demand in production, Wu explained.

“Any employment loss in our data we found came from the non-adopting firms,” she said. “These firms became less productive, relative to the adopters. They lost their...

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/art ... irm-ready/

Podcast available at source

Do we need humans for that job? Automation booms after COVID-19
Matt O'brien and Paul Wiseman

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks.

"It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. "It doesn't get corona. And the reliability of it is great."

The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand.

Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe.

If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas."

Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says.

Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise."

Improvements in robot technology allow ...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavir ... -1.5574228

We all knew this was coming ....

WALMART STORE SWITCHES TO SELF-CHECKOUT ONLY
DISCLAIMER: This post may contain affiliate links.

Self-checkouts are nothing new, they have been around for a couple of years now. You can find them in grocery stores, hardware stores, even Mcdonald’s has the option to use a self-checkout instead of a traditional cashier. A Walmart store is starting to switch to a self-checkout store only.

Walmart Self-Checkout

Fayetteville, Arkansas is doing a new test for its Walmart. They will only be having self-checkouts at their store, no cashiers. This is a new experiment for them to see what works better.

If all goes well and the test is successful, then Walmart will do the same thing in more locations and ...

https://kitchenfunwithmy3sons.com/walma ... kout-only/

Your next nurse might be a cute little blue eyed thing too:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=yo ... &FORM=VIRE


(This is a different video than the one I originally say. When their screens are off they have great big blue eyes that blink and a cute smile.)

Can't you put the bags back in the cart? I know the bags are weighed to make sure you only put the stuff you pay for in but if you can put them on the floor you should be just as able to put them back in the cart.

Robots & Automatization: Will a Robot Do Your Job?

When the first light bulb hit the market, there were serious concerns about the future prospects of those who worked as oil lamp or candle manufacturers. The invention of the electric light allowed for night shifts in many factories, which led to more employment opportunities. The Luddites were formed 100 years earlier in England at the dawn of the industrial age. They used to smash machines, fearing that they would eliminate all humans from the factory floors.

Yet, even though the industrialization process has been two centuries old, workers still work at factory floors alongside their robot counterparts. But will robots be the only threat to ...

https://www.ragingblox.com/robots-autom ... -your-job/

My concern is that when automation goes awry we'll be helpless since we won't knowhow to actually do anything.

Perhaps we should be studying design, manufacturing and maintenance for now

Hmm. Seems silly if an employee is actually scanning the items for you...that they cannot put bags in the cart. Used to be big long conveyor belts for all your stuff. I don't know why they shortened them all to these little bag stations. I used to take all my stuff out of the cart, then run the empty cart to the other end and put all the bags in it and start filling them with the groceries coming down the belt. At Fresh Market they have an empty basket at the other end of the register and you fill it up and take it and then your empty cart becomes the empty cart at the end for the next person. But their prices are high, I guess because they hire smarter people.

I still cant believe they put your groceries on the FLOOR!

#143

Machines don't get paid.