In a move to free up more time for employees and turn their skills in a more customer-facing direction, Walmart announced on April 9 that they will bring in thousands of robots to work in almost 5,000 of the supermarket chain’s stores. With 11,348 stores total, the robots will be in nearly half of all Walmart locations.
The robots won’t be doing every job in a typical Walmart, but they will be replacing workers who do more manual and repetitive tasks. This includes scrubbing floors, tracking shelf inventory, and unloading trucks.
Before this announcement, Walmart had already started using robot unloaders in hundreds of stores. A far cry from the bow lathe and bow drill, the first machine tools ever recorded in existence, Walmart’s robot unloaders pull boxes out of delivery trucks while automatically scanning and sorting merchandise.
Walmart will soon deploy this unloader to over 1,100 retail locations. Keeping humans out of potentially hazardous environments, such as large warehouses, can prevent employees from joining the 25,000 Americans who suffer from an ankle sprain every day. According to the retailer, this automation also helps save time, mitigate rising costs, and reduce turnover.
“Automating certain tasks gives associates more time to do work they find fulfilling and to interact with customers,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillion told CNN.
Stores will also start using autonomous floor cleaners, known as the Auto-C, that only require a human worker to clear an area and turn the machine on to clean and polish floors. Meanwhile, the Auto-S shelf scanner will scan store shelves for missing or misplaced items and accurate pricing. When its scanning device finds something amiss, it will alert employees to start the reshelving or reorganization process.
These robotic additions to Walmart’s workforce won’t go as fast as the AC Cobra Coupe, which famously reached 186 mph on a British motorway in 1964, but they will work quickly enough to effectively increase efficiency and sales. And as the robots eliminate the need for human workers in more manual jobs, Walmart maintains that employees will now be able to perform more varied tasks. These duties will include things like selling merchandise to customers and other customer service roles.
McMillon has long pointed to Walmart’s in-person customer service team and extensive store network as the chain’s biggest advantages over rivals like Amazon. With over 90% of the U.S. population living within 10 miles of a Walmart location, this claim of convenience certainly seems to be true.
However, the cost of operating each 178,000 square-foot superstore adds up. As Walmart invested over $2 billion last year in remodeling locations across the country, it is turning to robotic solutions to help make up for their expenditure.
With unemployment at its lowest level in decades, other grocery chains and retailers have also been turning to robots to solve the growing labor shortage in the retail industry. Earlier this year, Giant Food Stores named its tall, gray, and googly-eyed robot “Marty” and placed it in all 172 of its grocery stores to clean up spills.
