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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

> the robots are 50% more efficient than a human doing the same task. They can also scan shelves three times more quickly and are a lot more accurate. Human employees can only scan shelves about twice a week.

Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)

Walmart is testing a robot from Bossa Nova (Pittsburgh and SF)

http://www.bossanova.com/

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bossa-nova-robotics-...

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> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)

Just got from Lowes and they do it on the web and in their app. Search for an item, and if it is in stock it will show you its location on the store map.

OTOH, every Walmart I've visted is unable to keep their shelves full. [1] How hard it is to keep something non-perishable (like deodorant) in stock? Somehow Target figured that out.

[1] https://consumerist.com/2013/04/05/walmart-employees-tell-co...

Anecdote time!

I bought a water softener at HomeDepot about three weeks ago. Initially went to my local Lowes where I had checked if one was in stock and at the store. Yes and Yes. Get to Lowes and there is no water softener, as the website indicated. Lowe's employee checked the back as well, wasn't there.

There are many problems with humans doing this "inventory business" at $10 an hour or so. The professional counts that happen once or so a year by outside agencies wouldn't be necessary otherwise.

To be fair, I've had issues at Home Depot as well... lots of; "The computer says there are 2 in stock... I have no idea where they are."

Yeah, it isn't perfect. Sometimes I see more variety on the shelves then was reported by the search results. But my primary use case is the store map. It is so easy to get lost in Lowes/Home Depot.

You’d think it’d be a simple matter of 1. automatically decrementing a counter when the item is scanned at checkout; and 2. manually decrementing the same counter when you throw things out for breakage or expiry (i.e. pretend the dumpster is a customer and ring up its purchases.)

That would just leave theft, which is usually predictable with ML (this being part of what loyalty cards are for), and doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

>doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

Everything gets stolen. Mostly by employees. When I worked retail somebody got away with a treadmill. Just wheeled out the door on a cart, nobody said a thing. Later I was looking for a treadmill after a customer had checked the online stock count, and the system was off by three, not just the one I knew had disappeared.

The other big problem with the counts is just stuff moving around the store. It's a limited physical space, and it isn't all merchandised according to the book. Un-recorded promo displays get set up, things get moved onto top shelves and departments where they don't belong.

I was checking online to verify local stock at Lowes and Home Depot last week. Both websites stated '2' in stock. I had to stop in both stores BC Lowes diddn't have another item I needed, so being curious I checked both stock counts of the item. Both had more than 10, which made me think: if item count >= 2, display 2

Obviously it's not the only explanation, but I assume they use marketing research to help decide what inventory counts to display

Home Depot's website can actually show you where items are on a map. I discovered this because my local Home Depot used to be a KMart and has the most bizarre layout I've ever seen.

It's too bad Home Depot doesn't have wifi and LTE reception is often crappy inside their big box. This is amazing when it works, but so frustrating most of the time when you can't actually load the info without going outside.

There are software solutions for managing resupply, even for perishable products like fresh meat where you want to minimise write-offs: https://www.blue-yonder.com/en/solutions/replenishment-optim...

> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)

Isn’t something Walmart doesn’t want you to have? Having a mapping means being more efficient when shopping in the store, which means less time in it and so less opportunities to buy things.

This reminds me of the argument some (now dead) portal page/search engine company made to Larry Page when Larry and Sergey showed off their page rank algorithm.

It was basically something like the following: "This is no good - if the search results are too good then people won't stay on our page long enough to see the ads"

This is basically what triggered them to start their own company instead of licensing the tech (I'm remembering most of this from In The Plex which I read a while back).

Basically it's stupid not to make the core thing better - especially in the case where Walmart's real competition is Amazon.

Market pressures always lead to quality decay over time. Even with Google - it started with lightweight, quality, bullshit-free search. Look at it now.

Especially Google Maps, I'm waiting for a competitor to blow it out of the water. Satellite images are relatively cheap, you could have a map that shows a daily updated image of every street, and show timelapses. But their streetview would be very tough to displace.

Their mobile maps are bloated and their web maps have been better, but I'm not sure how Google or anybody else can get cheap daily streetview imagery. I've been waiting for somebody to partner with the postal service and slap cameras on every truck.

I think parent was refering to satellite imagery; not street view.

From iOS and Android apps you can search a for products in a specific store. It displays Aisle number and some broad stock information. Maps have been trialed as well. There are challenges with data quality to get maps to work well. Poor data quality is due to managers being able to move shelves around without updating central systems and stock living in multiple places within a store (same SKU). Locating consumers on a map has also been trialed with LED based indoor positioning. Walmart do try lots of stuff and work with lots of vendors. Rolling out to 4000+ stores is a multi-year challenge. See eReceipts, Savings Catcher, Scan'n'Go, Walmart Pay et al. Usually 3 years from pilot to chain.

Walmart's core customer personas are "busy moms" - they know that, in the long term, providing mom with convenience, efficiency, and low prices wins over trying to force her to waste time lost in the store.

>> Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)

If you search an item in the Walmart mobile app, it will tell you the aisle that the item is in, in the store you are in (there is an automatically-entered "store mode" that is driven by location detection.)

They have all the data across 5,000 stores and >100,000 SKUs. The robot helps ensure that customers haven't moved items from where they are supposed to be.

> http://www.bossanova.com/

Oh no, it's _ugly_!

I don't think it's that bad. It's meant to be practical and inoffensive rather than especially stylish.

If, at least, it could have been offensive!

They missed a perfect opportunity to give it legs and have it clomp around the aisles muttering "gonk... gonk..."

I see what they did there. Bossanova --> nova boss --> new overlord

Why does it have to be a robot riding around? Couldn't the same thing be done from a camera on the ceiling?

Because robots look cooler. Also, I imagine it’s probably doing some stuff with depth perception crap and what have you.

But then you would have to spend lots of money of redesigning ceilings, having regular maintenance work done, etc.

It would probably mean that the camera would either have to hang down pretty low in the isles or the isles would need to be super wide so that the camera could get a good view angle of the entire shelf, including bottom rows. But sure I suppose they probably could have something that rides around on a track on the ceiling and raises and lowers to get into position in each isle.

Like Oto (sp?) from Wall-E?

They already do it at POS.

Lots of store websites have a feature where you select a location and it tells you whether a product is in stock or not (and often how much is in stock).

The more interesting question to me is why the robot has to go scan the shelves at the time you ask, when there could just be one (purpose-built) robot that walks the shelves once per night and builds up a model of the entire store that gets used by the other robots for the rest of the day. The hospitality robots wouldn’t even need to be able to see the shelves; they’d just need to be able to guide themselves to the right coordinates in the store and say “it should be right in front of me.”

What hospitality robots are you talking about? Does Walmart have hospitality robots? I only saw the stock scanning robot in the article.

Brickseek?

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