Target, Walmart Automate More Store Tasks
wsj.com
wsj.com
The common explanation is cost savings, but I've observed another major driver : quality of service.
Our current unemployment rate is virtually the lowest in 20yrs and it's hard to hire ANYBODY as a result. (1)
And the low unemployment rate has had the interesting effect of upwards mobility for the traditional unskilled clerk / laborer / driver / server / etc.
As a result the labor pool that is showing up is less professional / educated than they have been in the past which is creating major quality of service issues, training issues, etc.
Automation in some of these jobs is a necessity, as the automation tech is a closer reality than availability of "professionalized" unskilled labor.
(1) https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_...
Many people forget about them altogether. They are not all un-retrainable.
[1]http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/10/news/economy/95-million-out-...
Skilled employees come from being trained and taught. They don't fall from the sky.
Navigating this, in my experience, takes a lot of emotional intelligence on our part and I don’t know how I’d scale that in a bureaucratic organization.
I have had managers complain about turnover and offered to sign a contract with them if we could agree on set goals that would translate to a set raise if reached each year. They don't even entertain the thought.
Companies and managers want to just mine society for skilled labor but put zero investment into creating it. They can lie in the bed they made at this point. Most employees would prefer known stability. We didn't all start job hopping because the idea of working at one place for 40 years and retiring comfortablly became unpalatable to the population at large. We started getting treated as disposable and now employers are treated as disposable right back
I respect but don’t generally share your dimmer view of the labor market, but I do agree that some companies have made it difficult for other companies to present themselves as stable places worth investing time into. I also think some employees have made it difficult for other employees. I try to improve the situations I can control.
There is an obvious failure mode here (well, a related pair of them) -- I don't want to sign a clawback contract, get fired just before x years, and have to disgorge the training costs. This is a live issue with option vesting and it's only not a live issue with training costs because that sort of employment contract is rare.
On the other hand, once we've signed a multi-year contract making it difficult for you to fire me, I may not be inclined to work all that hard.
Employers are going to have to raise their rates a lot if they expect to have people maintain skills that are relevant to the employer while not offering stable employment.
Right... Training, once paid for, is a "sunk cost." The decision to fire or retain an employee can't really be based on recovering costs associated with hiring the employee.
Or pay them what their worth so they don't look for greener pastures. Having skilled employees is an asset.
I stay at Hilton hotels and they frequently have digital keys that use phone to open the hotel door. I don't even interact with any staff, just use the app and I'm out and in at my own leisure. Some businesses are just skirting the line between do we invest in employees or automate things, and of course automating things is the preferred option.
Retail and other business that deal with the public also have the problem that people are a pain in the ass from the whole "customer is always right" attitude. No one with options is going to choose to work in retail, so they will always be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of employee talent.
Difficult. Probably not impossible (they are already employing the sliver of people willing to accept the hours and pay and not immediately able to obtain a better job).
The heart of what's going on (good or bad; I tend to think it's bad for society in general) does not lie on the surface, instead it's rooted on the flawed notion that profits to appease shareholders should be maximised and indeed prioritized over corporate goals that benefit society in general.
Increased automation and productivity are a good thing. They have the potential for increased standards of living for all. Unfortunately, the profits from increased productivity are not being redistributed/recycled into higher wages and a more educated workforce, they are instead being hoarded at the top by shareholders accumulating wealth.
That's certainly the prerogative of shareholders, but it's a foolish shortsighted bet. This faulty thinking is depleting a large consumer base because an increasing number of people have less to spend on taxes, and also products/services that these same companies sell. So, they're basically stealing from the future to eat heartily now. The future of our children, as a result will have a less educated and poorer populous, resulting in more crime, litter/pollution, and likely even a social atmosphere ripe for violent revolution thanks to the increasingly segregated wealth gap. It is what it is, and you can bet your sweet bippy that I'm not selling the stock I've accumulated for the good of the masses in the long term. However, I don't think it needs to end poorly.
If you want to dig into this deeper, I highly recommend "WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us," by Tim O'Reilly.(1)
It explains the philosophical shift that needs to occur to repair our societal trajectory, not just for the sake of the 99%, but also the 1% (and even the 0.01% where the worlds wealth reserve is truly accumulating).
This observation is so weird in the context of flat wages and the proliferation of sub-minimum-wage "gig economy" jobs. If labor was really scarce, shouldn't that put upward pressure on wages? Perhaps what automation is doing is giving employers a way out of competing for labor. The long range consequences seem pretty obvious: massive, rising inequality.
I guess in a way it's just another signal that the jobs being filled aren't that critical.
I work for a medium-sized established tech company. We've been running without a CTO and Director of HR for > 6 months. Everything has run smoothly. We've even had open positions for mid-tier management that have gone unfilled for long enough that they were deemed 'unnecessary' and the req was closed.
However, we had two of our operations people (one step above entry level) leave, and our regional office almost tanked completely.
People can be taught that it's not just what they do, but also how they do it that makes them valuable. It just costs some money.
For example, younger workers now may have never answered a shared phone line outside of a work setting, so they may need phone training previous generations would have gotten at home.
Is this actually true? In the US, healthcare costs in particular have outpaced inflation meaning that a worker earning the same in inflation-adjusted dollars is getting worse care. This is backed up by the fact that life expectancy has started to decline[1].
Finally, saying that "you're better off than 1985" does not address the fact that the economy has not just kept pace with inflation. That growth is going somewhere and it's not into the wages of the middle class. Inequality is not just bad for the people at the bottom. It has a tendency to destabilize politics as people realize that the game is rigged and swing towards the political extremes.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-stu...
When I get to the self-checkout, finally, I feel ten people waiting behind me. I can't make a mistake! I have to hurry! I scan items quickly, I see them rolling down to the end of the conveyor belt, piling up. No mistakes! Then I have to run down and pack all of my groceries before the next person begins, but it's too late, they are sending down their peanut butter, milk, etc.
Food is now just another objective to tap onto the clipboard. A long passionless journey from farm to mouth, untouched by human hands. Tasteless mass production.
/satire, almost
I welcome this change.
1. I go to a store where workers are paid bare minimum, they give me odd looks and make me feel as if I stole their bread or smth.
2. I go to premium stores, where I pay more but they treat me better.
So, I go to premium stores even though I am aware I am losing more money, because in Maslow hierarchy of needs - I am at the top where I want to be treated better not save more money.
Cost of negative interaction is much much greater for me. I randomly have flashbacks of negative experiences but I forget all positive or neutral experiences.
Based on Exchange theory of Price, #2 price is justified.
Now, if you remove the workers in option #2, the interaction goes from negative to neutral and I'll prefer #1.
(Might be cultural difference though. I'm in Germany.)
Multiple times we've debated going out of our way to go to a store where we don't have to deal with these type of people. Not to save money, just so we can be treated with some modicum of respect by other shoppers. I've never liked grocery shopping but the people in more affluent areas just make the entire experience something I dread.
Scuba stores have traditionally survived on markups from equipment sales. Everything else is a loss leader. But now, people can get a wider range, of better equipment, delivered faster, at half the price - via the internet! Yet STILL, bozos like those guys can not be bothered to service someone who's made the effort to walk in the door!
It makes me wonder how many small businesses go under because of good ol' garden variety hopeless customer service, rather than anything else.
Especially considering no name is attached. Given it's the WSJ you'd think they'd insist on getting attribution.
Of course that is what all the newly redundant staff will be doing. Because customer service is the top priority of a discount retailer.
Does similar setups exist in the US market?
For ultra-budget big-box stores, it can be hard to even find staff sometimes.
I also saw the deli open frequently with no one manning it. It wasn't closed, just had no one to run the machines
More recently many Fry's seem to have become ghost towns - even the banks of registers seemed to have thinned out, likely due to an expectation of never seeing that volume of customers again. The most probable explanation? Amazon. It's all the same cheap electronics.
Any peculiarities on how you handle the goods - e.g. repositioning something that fell over in the "checkout area"- results in an escalation.
The implementations out there are untrusting and non-optimized and take significantly longer than a real clerk.
I've used a lot of these and it's always the same.
I don't understand why this is a negative? I guess I usually optimize my shopping trips for getting out the door faster. Different people enjoy different things I guess.
First, as you're shopping, you load everything into the cart. Then, you get to the cash register, and at most supermarkets you have to take everything out of the cart so the cashier can scan it (if you're at a Kroger, you can skip this step). After the cashier is done, you may or may not have to put the bags back in the cart yourself depending on whether or not there's a dedicated bagger. Then, you take your cart to the car and you load up the car. Now, the next step will probably be different if you own your own car; I don't, so I either go to the supermarket with someone I know or take Lyft. In either case, I take everything out of the trunk and put them in front of my front door. After everything's done and the driver has driven away, I unlock and open the door and take all the bags into my house. Then I sort through my bags and begin putting all the individual groceries wherever they're supposed to go.
It's exhausting. If I can cut out even one of those steps, I'm happy. At Kroger, I'll just wheel my cart over to the cashier's station, swipe my Kroger Plus card, stick my credit card in the chip reader, and play with my phone until the machine starts beeping at me to take the card out.
Also, I grew up with the expectation of emptying your cart onto a conveyor belt, so it's probably socially programmed into me that it's expected.
Ideally, the only movements the customer would make would be to place items into their cart, and move their entire order, already packaged for transport, into their vehicle at once. Unloading from the vehicle and moving to a pantry or refrigerated storage should also be easy and free of unnecessary movements.
My solution would be to make the carts a platform of elevated rollers, carrying several reusable bins, owned by the customer, and manufactured to an open standard. While shopping, the rollers are locked, and the bins are secured in place. The customer can choose to organize foods in bins according to their individual needs. Put all the dairy in one bin, and meats in another. Put canned and boxed goods in one, refrigerated and frozen into another (insulated, perhaps).
At the checkout, the platform docks. The cashier scans from the nearest bin into a sorting area, and a second employee, the customer, or the cashier can re-pack the bin in a sensible way, rather than according to the disorganized arrangement determined by the layout of aisles in the store. The packed-for-transport bin moves onto a second docked platform. The docking station spins its torque rod to move all the rollers, and the remaining bins move closer to the cashier. Process repeats until all bins are scanned and packed.
Customer pays, and rolls cart to their vehicle. They put the lids back on the bins (which are now stackable closed containers) and stow them. The roller platforms stay in the parking lot. When the next customer arrives, they load one up with empty, lidless bins, and enter the store, ready to shop. New bins sold inside the store, likely at a wafer-thin markup.
At home, the customer might have their own handtruck to move bins from vehicle to food storage. Maybe their pantry has roller shelves, and a special drill bit so a handheld drill can spin them. Or maybe they just have regular shelves, and stick PTFE pads onto the bottoms of their bins for easy sliding. Perhaps they unload the bins and stack the empties for the next shopping trip. Maybe they can plug some hoses from a cooling unit into an insulated bin to turn it into a miniature refrigerator. As long as the bin conforms to the external dimensions and weight standards, it can have any number of additional features included. Pelican, Coleman, Igloo, Yeti, Rubbermaid, etc. could compete on those special features, or on materials.
Self-checkout is a perfect example of compromise - not what the workers want, not what the business wants, and not the shoppers want.
It looks like this: http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5560d80cecad048a6f5...
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-woman-weighing-pineapple-o...
http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/1/17470/32_2008/mettl...
The one in my local grocery store is the best because its main screen is big buttons of the most common produce plus a "lookup" option. 90%+ of the time I only have to put my produce on the scale and hit one giant button.
Have yet to see that in the US... instead we have shrinkwrapped everything (and barcoded stickers)
Not in my experience. The codes are all right there (on a sticker on the fruit or vegetables) or easily looked up by name/picture.
Unexplained item in bagging area.
I have had so many issues with the self-checkout's sensor not working properly. If it's not telling me there's something in the bagging area that's not supposed to be there, it's telling me that it can't detect the item I just put in the bag. It's especially common if the item is lightweight. Usually the sensor fails to pick up the item I just put in the bag and won't let me scan anything else unless I either do or press "I don't want to bag this item". And then I scan the next item and then it finally picks it up and whines about an unexplained item in the bagging area.
Whenever I use the self-checkout, I usually end up having to call over the attendant multiple times to deal with these problems. And the attendant is busy with half a dozen other people, so the self-checkout ends up being slower than the regular one.
So the usage pattern goes: scan, bag, scan, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, enter code, weigh, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, process payment, move all bags, leave. You can't scan the bread and eggs and the watermelon and leave the fragile crushable items on the belt until the heavy items are already in the bag. Everything must be moved immediately to the bagging area, human! So if you don't plan your scanning, you end up moving some things twice. Weight discrepancy noted. Return items to the bagging area and wait for the store employee to verify that you aren't cheating!
For the regular checkouts, the usage pattern is often customer moves entire order to first conveyor belt, employee 1 scans all items and passes them onto the second conveyor belt. At this point, there may be an employee 2 that bags the scanned items and places the bags back into the empty cart as employee 1 processes payment, then both bag until the order is processed. That works fine. Not great, but it works well enough.
At some stores, the bagger employee has been deprecated. The cashier bags items into a bag carousel. At some stores, the conveyors are not used. Cashier scans items directly from the cart. The most efficient stores, such as Aldi (Aldi Sud, in US), scan directly from one cart into another, and don't even bother with bags. The customer can keep Tyvek bags in their vehicle, and bag directly from the cart to their trunk, if they even care about bags at all. (Maybe they keep specialized containers for specific sizes of cans, instead?)
Self-checkout doesn't work like that. It's almost designed to be annoying and frustrating. It could be so much better if they only designed the experience from the ground up instead of trying to make a drop-in replacement for the employee checkout lanes, which were designed for different criteria decades ago.
Cashiers scan hundreds of items during their shift. They are not looking at the product like you do when you select it from the shelves amongst a number of alternatives; they are merely glancing at it to get the barcode oriented towards their scanner. Your curiosity tends to take a back seat with repetitive work like that (you would be mentally exhausted in an hour if you did actually 'look' at everything).
Unrelated to product selection, I also had one cashier somehow steer the standard small-talk exchange into saying that I need to accept Jesus. That just shows that some cashiers have no idea what is or isn't appropriate to say to a customer.
When I was a cashier I certainly looked at the products I was scanning beyond orienting to the barcode so I don't really know where you're getting that from. It wasn't "mentally exhausting" or anything either, that's a little weird to say. In fact, cashier are required to actually 'look' at the product in some amount of detail because some items need to be bagged a certain way and they need to check ID on some products, like alcohol.
1) At the self-checkout, I'm constantly calling over the attendant anyway because the machines are shit.
2) The cashiers don't give a fuck. It's a repetitive mind-numbing job and the customers all blend together into one long miasma of scanning.
Also, hilarious story: one of the first times I bought stuff, I had filled my cart with a bunch of stuff and then went to pay and found out the self-checkout was down, so I had to go to a cashier. As the cashier started scanning, I felt really embarrassed so I just blurted out "I lost a bet". That was probably the stupidest thing I could've done because now I called attention to it when it would've just blended into the miasma of scanning if I didn't. Hell, even if the cashier did notice what she was scanning before, they could've just thought I was buying stuff for my girlfriend or something, but I scuttled any chance of that happening...
The self-checkout in itself might not be considered as automation, but it leverages on innovations that made the contribute of the cashier really minimal.
That said, as a customer, self-checkouts are a worse experience than having a cashier doing it (faster and more efficiently).
Except in New Jersey and Oregon.