Both Target and Walmart are adopting various techniques for adding robots in their counters. This change would bring massive impact on the huge workforce of both the companies and also decide their future of robots in retail shops. These companies have currently kept the robots in trial at warehouses. Walmart, the biggest retailer in U.S as well as a private firm has already announced that they have decided to bring in self-handled robots for cleaning floors in 1860 counters out of 4700 stores present in U.S by next year February. Robots would also be introduced for self-inventory work in nearly 350 stores. And in 1700 more stores, robots would be responsible for scanning boxes as they come out of delivery trucks and arrange those in proper shelves on conveyor belts.
The size of Walmart super markets are approximately 178,000 square foot. And such a huge size is very expensive to manage, and more when people these days prefer online shopping. Bringing in robots is an initiative to help employees increase productivity as well as keep the cost under control. Walmart keeps approximately 1 million workers that work every hour in their stores.
The firms have commented that by keeping robots, their smartness would come handy and help the workers in doing things faster. That way, workers can take on other roles like – better customer handling and other functions that would need communication. In fact, after the robots start working, Walmart has decided to reduce hours of their employees. Other than these two, Grocery chains are also slowly shifting to robots. Giant Food Stores and Stop & Shop, both owned by Ahold Delhaize talked about employing Marty, a robot, in almost 500 stores. The robot is in-charge of looking after spillage. Albertsons have also kept few robots in certain stores for trial.
