For the top managers of America's largest supermarket chain, the introduction of the Auto-C floor cleaner was seen as a logical evolution of retail. Two years ago, they allocated several hundred million for it. Still: such an assistant is able to eliminate human error, reduce costs, increase the speed / quality of cleaning and, in the future, lead a mini-revolution in American super stores.
But among the workers at Walmart No. 937 in Marietta, Georgia, the revolutionary device was given a different name - "Freddy". Named after the janitor the store fired the day before the Auto-C went online.
The new Freddie's career in the supermarket didn't go well from the start. The tin worker regularly got "nervous breakdowns", deviated from the laid route, he constantly needed new adjustments, sometimes several times a week he had to conduct "training" and call in specialists to set him up.
Buyers also did not know how to react to the appearance of the new Freddie. One Walmart employee, Evan Tanner, recalls how one night a man fell asleep on top of a car, and it obediently carried him to the toy department.
Company executives are skeptical about such stories. They say Auto-C is smarter than you might think. If someone interferes with his work, he will stop and give a signal so as not to waste extra energy. But Tanner claims that Freddie was diligently spinning around the supermarket until someone pulled the sleeping person off him.
Over the past 50 years, Walmart has changed the way Americans live more than once. By tens of thousands, removing small shops, rebuilding small towns to please themselves, creating new opportunities for work and shopping. The company is now satisfied revolution of all by launching thousands of robots - scanners, cleaners, conveyor-shippers, smart cameras and online shopping machines - from her growing internet business. A giant experiment that will show how comfortable it is for people - workers and customers - to communicate with robots in the real world. And whether it increases real sales.
Previously we how the company, for the sake of experiment, installed Auto-C robotic scrubbers in 360 of its stores. Then the experiment was declared successful - and their number is up to 1860. Already next year, Walmart plans to introduce them to all supermarkets in the country.
In order for the new technology to be adopted faster, the company first said that the new robots would not affect the lives of real employees in any way. And if they do, they'll even improve it! Now they will only be left with creative work that cannot be automated (like selecting bad apples, guarding, communicating with customers, helping them choose products, meat and fish). Employees will have more free time and it will be more pleasant for them to do their job!
But we already see that this is not the case. A successful Walmart experiment shows that one car can replace at least three or four people - like Freddie. Within Walmart, that's about a million lost jobs. In total, according to the McKinsey agency, by 2030, because of robots, from 400 to 800 million people will have to change their place of work.
The βmachine uprisingβ at Walmart, workers say, has had an unexpected side effect. They feel like their work has actually become even more monotonous. The robot focus and this whole new paradigm makes managers think of "hyper-optimization". Every step, every sneeze, every movement must be precise and well-adjusted. And if not, the cameras record everything. Part of the work that employees found relaxing (filling shelves, scanning products, the same cleaning floors behind the wheel of a cool machine) is now taken over by robots. And people get, according to the workers, more "exhausting" work.
It also doesn't help that many employees feel like their most important job right now is to keep an eye on their robotic colleagues. Clean, repair, nurse and train those who will one day put them out of work.
For buyers, it all depends on how attractive the car is. So far, everything is fine with Auto-C βscrubbersβ (you see, they even sleep on them). But Auto-S scanners, they say, scare many. Such a long two-meter giraffe, slowly and silently leaving behind a shelf, puts many into a state of stupor. They are also quietly kicked and beaten, especially young people. Like, why is he blocking the passage, this stupid robot.
Although this machine has already lived in total for 200 years, has taken more than 5 billion images and traveled more than 45 kilometers between Walmart counters, and remembers a hundred thousand visitor encounters, many customers see something like this for the first time, and the thing seems too funny to them. just to pass by.
Automatic shelf checker Auto-S
Employees at a dozen new "automated" supermarkets told reporters that the machines help them a lot, plus they're cute. Almost everywhere they were given names. Someone spoke about the nature of robots - someone is "angry", someone is "cheerful". Some complained mainly that the introduction of robots has sped up the overall pace of work, and now they mostly constantly respond to alerts sent to them by machines, which is not very fun.
Walmart's management team says the response to the robots among employees has been "overwhelmingly positive" and likens its machines to Star Wars droid R2-D2 and Optimus Prime's transformer. βEvery hero needs a sidekick,β they tell workers. βAnd now you have some of the best.β
Our mechanical overlords
Robots don't complain, they don't ask for promotions, they don't need vacations or breaks. At a shareholder meeting in August, company president Doug McMillon said that these machines are the company's main hope, and how it sees itself in the future. Walmart has an annual revenue of $514 billion and a net income of only $6,7 billion. The introduction of robots will bring these two figures a little closer to each other.
We test and scale new automation technologies. This is an important, decisive time. Our specific cost management plans are vital.
The scale is really impressive. One Walmart in Levittown (pop. 50) has 100 servers, 10 cooling towers, 400 graphics cards, and 50 meters of cables to support all the robots and cameras. All this allows AI systems to manage the store, in fact, instead of managers. Cameras and weight sensors automatically detect if shopping baskets are about to run out, a tag is misplaced, or bananas are about to be overripe.
Further, if AI senses a problem, it sends a signal to, in fact, a smartphone, which should be in the hands of every employee. And that shows what they need to do now. Go collect carts in some part of the store. Replenish stocks of apples. Go update labels. The supermarket employs about 100 people who do all the physical work.
Such gadgets should be in the hands of all employees of "advanced" Walmart
Employees of this "advanced" store complain that they constantly feel humiliated. A soulless robot knows and understands everything better than they do. If earlier each supermarket had a manager who could be approached with questions, now the system makes all the major decisions. If before each Walmart was slightly different in character from all the others, depending on the people who managed it, now everyone who has such an AI platform works identically. "Soullessly." Getting fired or leaving, some joke, is like being promoted to customer.
Man is needed only in the most primitive stages. And everyone understands this. Floor cleaners especially. One described how bitter he was when the Auto-C arrived at their store. At the first stage, the machine does not yet know how to wash the floor. She needs to memorize the layout of the store. Therefore, for the first few days, the future former cleaner drives her by hand. He trains where the shelves are, where the counters are, where the cash registers are, which places to go around. And then he gets fired.
The next time such a βdriverβ will be needed only if the supermarket is dramatically rebuilt, changing everything inside, which happens no more than once every few years.
Household hatred of robots, they say, is a widespread thing. Some employees admit to calling them names and swearing at them using their new human names like "Emma", "Bender" or "Frank". Moreover, the expressions were chosen even more serious than if it was a skirmish between two employees.
world with machines
Martin Hitch, head of Bossa Nova Robotics, which builds scanner robots for Walmart, says the company has spent several years trying to make robots as human-friendly as possible. But there are no agreed rules of etiquette in the world yet, suggesting how people and machines should interact.
Engineers, for example, didn't want the robot to silently appear in the room, scaring people. Nobody wants a lawsuit from a heart attack. But with what sound should he announce himself? They tested several thousand options, from the comical "beep-beep" to the booming noise of a forklift. In the end, they settled on a pleasant but persistent chirping - a few bird songs, from which they edited one.
βThe last thing you want from him is to talk. Because if he talks, people think they can talk back."
Signals that seemed obvious and understandable to human testers turned out to be completely useless in the real world. For example, when the company put turn signals on a test robot, it only confuses people. No one expected to see twinkling lights while shopping for dumplings. And then react to them as if you were at a crossroads. For children and people with low vision, this solution also turned out to be far from ideal.
Prospection
Walmart that due to the introduction of robots, their staff turnover fell to the lowest level in 5 years. Plus, 40 workers are now in positions that didn't exist 000 years ago. At the same time, full-fledged employees of the company in the United States now averaging $14.26 per hour, higher than the industry average.
But many talk about the boredom that automation brings. Robots have taken some simple pleasures from employees, like shopping, and now people are left with small, unimportant, mind-numbing tasks. The same thing, they say, happened earlier with the introduction of self-service checkouts. Many cashiers have lost their jobs, but employees still need to be there to help confused shoppers, fix glitches, and calm the machine if it's signaling a problem.
Michael Webb, an economist at Stanford University who studies AI's impact on labor markets, says it's no coincidence that the technology's first real-world use was in supermarkets. These big companies depend on volume. Even the smallest improvement for them has huge consequences. Saving $1000 a month per store turns into hundreds of millions for Walmart in a couple of years. Investments in robots and artificial intelligence can pay off very quickly.
Small supermarket chains, Webb says, will get the technology much later. And high-end stores with expensive goods will most likely never switch to robots. βHaving people serving you is a special privilege and a service for which you will now have to pay extra.β
For Tanner, a Walmart employee at Marietta, where the new mechanical Freddy works, automation has changed just about everything. Previously, he was a department manager in the toy section. Now he mostly looks after robots. After they appeared, the store reduced the number of employees several times, especially among those who used to unload trucks and check the counters. Basically, Tanner performs routine tasks, to which the hands of the machines have not yet reached.
βThe store has been the same since they came here. Solid monotonous work. I feel like I'm slowly going crazy,β he says.
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Source: habr.com