LoweBot
lowesinnovationlabs.com
lowesinnovationlabs.com
- The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially).
- Ever try to use a touchscreen with dirty hands?
- It will probably be used more by management to keep track of inventory. This I figure is the biggest benefit. Having the robot scan the store could potentially lower the amount of personnel required to do inventory counts.
I'm excited about this. It might seem like a kiosk on wheels but could open up potential advancement/business opportunities once people get used to them. A lot of people still perceive robots as "evil".
This would seem to depend on the store, I've been spending a lot of time at each since I bought a house built in 1910 in late May, and that doesn't describe either of the ones I've been visiting (in Joplin, MO).
A store that wants a LoweBot to succeed, or one picked to get one, would in theory try to make sure this is generally true, on the other hand, creating floor debris would be a way for the staff to throw a monkey-wrench into a deployment.
This is just off the top of my head, and I'm intrinsically not interesting in robots, I'll bet this is a well developed area in it by now.
Google's answer is pretty reasonable in this case:
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+th...
=> First result [Parts of a Toilet | The Family Handyman]
Compare to Bing, which misses the point:
Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20t...
=> First result [Signs Of A Sewer Drain Clog]
> Furthermore, LoweBot is able to assist with inventory monitoring in real-time, which help detect patterns that will able to guide future business decisions.
This sounds interesting. Having an army of robots marching down the aisles and scanning inventory seems useful. Wouldn't be as accurate as a human checking behind a box or finding mislabeled merchandise but would probably be more than an 80/20 solution to the problem.
I'm not so sure. People are pretty expensive.
Lowes are open 6am to 10pm 5 days a week and 8-8 on the weekends. That's 104 hours per week, or ~5400 hours per year.
10% downtime and you're still looking at 5000 hours per year.
Google suggests sales associates get $11.70/hour. If you add on maybe 20-30% overhead for all the associated hiring costs, taxes and extra management needed the equivalent cost would be around $75k/year. I expect the true figure would be higher.
How much are these bots? They seem to be reasonably generic, but let's say a 5 year total cost is $200k, does that sound reasonable? That's around half the cost of a real person, so if each can replace about half of a person then that's a good deal.
And that all relies on what I think are fairly low overheads, a reasonable amount of downtime for the bots, quite a high price for the bot itself and an assumption that the bots can't do anything extra that saves time (the inventory scanning for example, or collecting more useful information).
At the very least, I don't think this is obviously much more expensive, and depending on a few factors could easily be much cheaper than a real person.
Large companies can afford to absorb many millions of dollars worth of losses for pilot projects because the learnings have the potential to far outweigh the losses. Even if each of these robots cost a million bucks a piece, if one robot can help Lowes learn something that reduces the cost of future robots by $100, spread across a 10,000 robot deployment, that robot has paid for itself.
They've got to try something. Staff has been noticably cut in both local Lowe's in my area over the past few years. It's still far better than Home Depot, but takes time to find help when you actually need it.
This is high capital cost purchase to reduce variable costs. Expensive to buy compared to the costs of hiring an employee, but (I would assume) low cost to maintain, and runs at all hours (so it partially replaces multiple employees).
It's not a question of whether it will pay off, but in how much time. If the answer is 20 years, it's not worth the cost. If the answer is 3 weeks, every store will have them in the next six months.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to do something like this, but for the time being I'm stuck were I am. Plus, I have a side thing going on myself that needs to get done. In truth though, there are better people than me who could make this a success.
Or maybe the robot should walk the aisles and scan all bar codes to make the DB for both
Personally I don't want to install an app, I just want to visit a mobile webpage.
Questions for the Designers...
- In that awkward "will there be anything else?" moment, after it's led me to the hard-to-find screws, what font size will the "fuck off" button have?
- Is it going to hover just off-camera, watching me with TSA level scanners, to make sure any screws don't go "missing"?
- Couldn't this be replaced with an In-store Map app I'll never download? (Unless the paint section is a Pokemon Stop.)
- Where's the off switch?