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Comment by fr0sty | Hacker News Reader

> we'll totally automate all this

How? A driver-less truck pulls up to the front of a corner store. Then what? Someone still has to take the (correct) product from the truck, load it on a hand cart, take it into each shop and put it on the shelves. Normally this is the driver of the truck, but if you automate him away then every shop-keep need a guy hanging around to unload the auto-delivery trucks all day or take time away from serving customers to do it themselves.

That is not a clear net win to me. It is a physical manifestation of automated phone support. Cheaper to implement by the company but more time consuming and less useful for the users and less efficient overall...

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I've never seen a truck driver restock a shelve; what kind of shops are you thinking of? Unloading the delivery of boxes should possible to automate using a robot like those from Kiva Systems, even if harder due to less standard conditions.

It depends. I worked in a small convenience store in the late 80s. The bread delivery (loaf bread, donuts, hostess twinkies, and so on) would directly fill the specialized display stands for these items. Part of the job was to remove items past the sell date. Ditto for items like nuts, ice, and such.

Other items were ordered from a wholesale distributer. Those were delivered by truck to the loading dock in cardboard boxes. We moved those into the store, unpacked the boxes, and filled the shelves.

Beer and such was put into the walk-in by the driver, and we stocked the coolers as needed.

It will be a long time before the local ice distributer goes automatic (for economic reasons it makes sense to make and distribute ice very locally). But wholesale distributers? I can see a truck with a lift gate and some kind of robot to automatically unload the truck. We always had to be there to receive anyway, except it was a human with a dolly moving the boxes into the bay.

It's pretty common for food and drink products. I believe Coke and Pepsi are (in)famous for doing this. They basically rent the shelf space in grocery stores and then maintain the stocking of it so they fully control the presentation.

I see this as an ongoing model/strategy for grocery stores and other retailers: Taking the Amazon approach where they're just distributors, and you pay for the shelf space, and a fee per transaction.

The manufacturer/distributor sets the price and the grocer could care less whether any sells at all, as long as they find a way to keep getting foot traffic.

I used to see that all the time in my local 7-11. Soft-drinks, confectionary, anything that needs 'merchandising'. Employees run the registers, keep the store clean, and one or two of them have training to take inventory using a tablet computer (this was before the advent of iPads; I don't live near a 7-11 any more so for all I know they've moved on since then).

For example, my partner works at a clothes retail shop. There's dozens of staff who work non-stop throughout the day to sort out incoming deliveries. It's a clothes shop: things belong on retail shelves and are hung up, so don't you think that a delivery truck could drive up to it (automated?) and "connect" to the shop through it's back opening, connect some sort of bar and have a fully automated stock room.. I know this explanation is terrible but we see such amazing automated warehouses and factories that it amazes me sometimes that not more of the world is automated, especially when it comes to shipping/delivery trucks/restocking, etc...

Schedule/stagger the deliveries so you have a person/group that does the unloading work for an entire plaza or area?

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