Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.
The system designers get tripped up by the strangest things. I once worked in a factory that uses copper bars of varying lengths, and the designer didn’t expect the bars to ‘sag’ when picked up flatwise from the middle. So I can imagine picking up a bag of dog food would do that.
That’s a bad engineer problem. Tasks must be reduced to absolute minimums, and operating scenarios must be maximized. Otherwise failure conditions will win.
They might have underestimated the mix of items. From bagged dog food with 20kg, boxes of all shapes down to small poly‘s is hard to handle. For picking robots as well as the sorting AGV‘s.
Amazon didn’t robotize its entire item spectrum yet, as far as I know. It focus on robotizable items.
If such a heavy dog food bag brakes, all the small pieces lie on the floor that those dumb AGV‘s drive upon. That’s immediately causing clogged wheels and even more. And to clean the mess up, one has to stop the entire AGV area as it’s not safe for humans to enter. One broken dog food bag can cause some expensive maintenance and drives operational costs up. 1 broken bag per month can likely kill your business case.
I mean anyone who’s ever done anything with a long piece of lumber or piping or anything could predict that.
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814
https://retailboss.substack.com/p/krogers-350-million-lesson-why-big
It’s one of the great ironies of our time that we spend billions on slop machines but haven’t yet been able to build a robot that can empty the dishwasher.
As a bachelor, a dishwasher is already a cabinet. It doesn’t need emptying.
I’ve considered buying a second dishwasher so I can just swap between two self-cleaning cabinets.
So instead of hiring actual people again, they’ll look for cheaper engineers and robots.
Nah it’s at least another decade of sunk cost management style then they will pivot back to humans once minimum wage has been repealed and the labor camps are in place
unskilled warehouse workers.
It’s ironic to call them unskilled in an article describing how their skills are beyond billion-dollar robots.
“Unskilled” meaning you can teach someone to do the job reasonably well off the street in a few hours. Unfortunately robots are not humans and thus need to be meticulously designed while a guy just needs a decent paycheck and benefits.
So much of automation is trying to put robots in places humans were ment to be instead of designing processes that are for robots not people.
It’s no wonder to me there is often issues
I’ll never understand takes like this. You think humans are meant to be shuffling around a warehouse picking and packing orders mindlessly?
I get being annoyed at corporations for greedily trying to save money at the expense of workers, but ultimately, I can’t be that upset over shit jobs going away.
In my view, we have to be focused on how to help The displaced workers which we have historically done a terrible job of. It only becomes more important as we are able to automate more and more tasks that previously required a person. Automation absolutely can be a tide that raises all boats; we just have to demand that it be so. Otherwise, all the benefit will go to the oligarchs instead of the people.
The process is designed around human ability, not what is easiest to implement in a machine.
Our capabilities are different. I don’t mean that humans are biological geared towards working on a warehouse. But that we design warehouses around what humans can do
As a forklift monkey: I hate my job and feel that humans weren’t meant for this monotonous kind of work. Like boomers who screwed in one nut on an assembly line who made enough to provide a family of 4, I’d blow my brains out before I’d do that. So fuck these jobs.
Remember when the disclaimer “please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery” was practically ubiquitous on mail order packages? It’s almost like that was a SANE way to run a logistics network!
We don’t send pieces of paper back and forth with days long transit time to complete an order anymore.
“We’ll pay billions in trying to automate things to avoid paying a few million for human employees.”
Anyone who has tried to automate anything beyond the most basic step quickly finds out how difficult it is to truly do it with all of the boundary conditions, bad inputs, breaking conditions, etc.
Link to the original article. Oh wait it’s WSJ slop.
Now displaced warehouse workers learn to maintain or program the bots and adapt to new jobs, but at some point, all this bot productivity should be taxed too or the wealth keeps concentrating among the few, rather than revenue to build better society for We The People.
Just tax wealth hoarding, doesn’t matter how the hoarding was achieved
