Woodman’s Markets to deploy aisle-roving robots | Hacker News Reader

Woodman’s Markets to deploy aisle-roving robots

supermarketnews.com

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Our local Stop & Shop supermarkets deployed robots similar to this about a year and a half ago, although all they do as far as I know is complain when they find a mess somewhere. I found them irrationally annoying. I'm not sure exactly why. But I've also noticed that lately they mostly sit in the corner and don't actually patrol any longer.

I wonder how the employees view this? The chain is an employee owned. Would they be concerned over being replaced?

Also that name is pretty insidious. Considering that chain is a Wisconsin based one... "Badger technologies" is based out of TN. Keep er moving (out of there) [That was a joke and a pro-Wisconsin reference guy]

Wal-Mart in is using automatic floor sweeping robots with customers present. They're made by Tennant with electronics by Brain Corp. You can buy them through Grainger.

I totally get the mis-priced items (but who puts prices on the containers anyway, other than the shelf stickers), and I get the items which someone might just put back on a random shelf, cuz people, but they know how much they ordered, was delivered and received and they also know via receipts how much they sold... so unless shrinkage is a big issue, they should know about stock levels and what items are selling well and have low stock...

Taking inventory is the equivalent of month end close in accounting, eg do your receipts match your accounts, and is a very tedious process that usually requires a lot of manpower to do in a very short timeframe (just like accounting!). Instead of having a bunch of staff wandering the aisles and scanning SKU's for hours after the store closes, I presume the advantage is the robot and its handler can do the job by themselves in less time for much less cost in overtime.

Yeah, I've worked for retail and restaurants during taking Inventory, it's a pain in the butt and never a fun time, and it's more of a special circumstance and not something that would really worry me about my job if I still worked retail having gone through the process.

At the place I worked they didn't really hire anybody extra for it to begin with, it was just an annoying extra responsibility you had to do once every 2-3 months.

That being said this could just be the precursor to even more employee reducing measures, so it could still be a bit worrying for the future, but just not having to deal with inventory I would think would be a relief as an employee.

Even if shrinkage is a small issue, how do you ever know what your inventory is without physically counting what's on the shelf?

I'm assuming this is much more cost effective than networked cameras pointed at the shelves, pressure plates, or other less futuristic methods?

I shop at Woodman's, and can't imagine how a robot could navigate the chaos. It's an experience. For instance huge families show up and push multiple carts through the store, then load everything into a pickup truck.

The bots are pretty unobtrusive. They take about 2 sqf of floor space and move slowly, beeping a little. People naturally go around them like they do other aisle obstructions. The bot will wait, turn around, or go around you if you're in its way.

I was surprised how pretty much everyone just ignores each other, considering it's the first mass integration of species.

What about us FIBs who load up our cars with cheap liqour.

Liquor area has a separate entry from the main entry. Every woodman's is the same that way. In any case, that means that the alcohol buyers are generally out of the way.

The rest of the store is chaos though, that part is true.

True. The separation may be related to the liquor laws. At least locally, they have to stop selling liquor at 9 PM, Even grocery stores that sell liquor have some sort of gate that they close at 9.

The chaos can be kind of fun when you're not worrying about the covid. They had one-way aisles for a few weeks, then it looks like they simply gave up on it. I can see the point of improving their data on location and stock levels. They seem to be somewhat unique in that they will stock whatever is available, so for instance some brands of canned goods come and go from month to month. Now you'd think that bar codes would help, since their original purpose was to automate the management of inventory. But honestly, running a supermarket without losing your sanity is one of those mysteries that I will probably never comprehend. The guy in charge seems to have an infinite amount of energy.

For those that don't know... Wisconsinite's refer to folks from Illinois as FIBs (@!#$ing Illinois B@$t@rd$) partly because FIBs own a lot of [lake] cabins in [northern] Wisconsin.

Add: And they irritate Wisconsinite's by driving like Chicagoans and clogging our interstates and roads.

Add: To drive like a Chicagoan is to drive like a Californian: fast (tail gators) and erratic (weaving). At least that's the stereotype.

As a Chicagoan and originally from the east coast. I'm offended. I prefer to be referred to as aggressive and fast. Keep er moving.

I grew up in Minnesota but lived in Wisconsin for 15+ years, so I'm probably a little passive-aggressive. I'll spot you that Chicago drivers know where they are going (agressive and fast is fair) and in reality it's all the non-locals cautiously driving thru Chicago trying to figure out what lane they need to be in to get to where they want to go.

This could help make pick-from-retail shopping services work better. Make a pass through the store every half hour and update what's out of stock for online ordering.

But there is a backroom to restock the shelves which is the real inventory. And that back room becomes the business when delivery goes mainstream. Some robotics solutions are about building a whole warehouse for that store room to fulfill online deliveries.

If it's out of stock to the picker, it's out of stock to the customer, regardless of whether the back room has more. The robot will report to the back room when a restock is needed, but if restock hasn't happened yet, the item is not saleable.

Webvan did pick-from-controlled-inventory 20 years ago. Worked fine, cost too much because they didn't have enough market penetration. They had 3% in 30 cities, and they needed 30% in 3 cities. Amazon is getting into that, cautiously.

There's quite a bit of just-in-time delivery for grocers. Years ago when I worked at a large supermarket, we only kept stock of items that would reasonably need restocked within the next day or so. Things like yogurt, milk, eggs, soda, chips, etc. The majority of the items on the "inner" items (ie not staples) had 0 stock in the back room.

Here is the link of how robots actually look like: https://www.badger-technologies.com/overview.html

We've changed the URL above from https://www.badger-technologies.com/blog/autonomous-robots-r..., which is a corporate press release (also dated 2019 - not sure if that's an error) to an article with more background, and yes a robot picture.

thanks i feel like there should be a special place in the unemployment line for writers that are so lazy they cant find a picture of a robot and instead sub a stock image of some spilled prego like that adds something to the article at all.

That's actually the official company website of this product.

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