A Robot Walks Into A Grocery Store...

Kat0121

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Let's get back on topic, which is Grocery Robots:
  1. Do you have a robot at YOUR grocery store?
  2. What do you think of grocery robots? Creepy? Helpful? :dunno:
  3. What would you rather see the money go towards?
No we don't. We have Publix and Winn Dixie. I don't know because I've only seen pictures and I have no idea what their purpose is. A salad bar.
 

Willowy

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I thought this was an interesting article. Nobody really knows what good the Marty robots do, lol.
Marty the grocery store robot is a glimpse into our hell-ish future

The article mentions that Walmart is planning to deploy some autonomous floor washing robots, which I think is a great idea, because those floor scrubbers don't really need anyone to ride them; they just go up and down the aisle, and during the winters here it's hard to keep up on slush patrol. So having a scrubby machine going back and forth constantly in the entryway would be terrific, instead of a human who has to periodically dash off to clean up a dropped jar of spaghetti sauce in aisle 4.

So to answer the question, I think stores would be better off spending their money on autonomous scrubby machines rather than Marties :D.
 

golondrina

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mani said:
Let's get back on topic, which is Grocery Robots:
  1. Do you have a robot at YOUR grocery store?
  2. What do you think of grocery robots? Creepy? Helpful? :dunno:
  3. What would you rather see the money go towards?

1. NO, fortunately we don't have any.
2. I only like what is natural. It is bad enough that some humans are not easy to approach to have to deal with robots.
3. Well prepared helpful human attendants.
 

LTS3

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Winchester Winchester a party depends on when your local supermarket chain rolled out the robots. Stop and Shop rolled out Marty robots on Jan. 25, 2019.

I think the robots are cute 🤖 Lots of people get a kick out of seeing Marty roll around. Kids are always excited to see him (it?). A local upscale mall had a security robot kind of like R2-D2 roaming around for a couple months or so. I heard the mall got more business / traffic because people wanted to check out the robot out of curiosity.

I don't know about other supermarkets but at Stop and Shop Marty's only job is to detect spills and debris on the floor that needs to be cleaned up. I guess it's one way for the store to save money - instead of paying a salary and benefits for an employee, just have Marty roam around and have a current employee or two assigned to help Marty when something is detected.
 

Winchester

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I'm starting to check out if/when there'll be a party for our Marty. And yeah, I like him/her. I just do. Marty makes me smile every time. When we were in Giant the other day, Marty was rolling by. A man and his wife were next to us and the guy said that he really liked Marty. Rick told the guy, "Oh, don't get my wife started on Marty! She just loves him!"

As for WalMart, if they got some good Marty robots to be cashiers, I'd be more inclined to shop there. I really don't like the cashiers at WM and that has a lot to do with why I refuse to shop there. On the very seldom times that I do, I always use self checkout, just so I don't have to deal with the cashiers.
 

LTS3

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If self check out is an option at the store, I'll use it even the lines are long and the regular lanes with cashiers are faster. I'm an introvert so dealing with people makes me :fear: Maybe that's why non-Humans like animals and robots appeal to me.

The novelty of robots in stores will eventually wear out, I think. Robots would then just be a part of the store and more commonplace and people would just ignore them.
 
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