Robotic Nation Evidence

Can't Wal-Mart, a Retail Behemoth, Pay More?

From the article:

With most of Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.

A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called 'Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart,' five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

And in a book to be published this fall, a group of scholars will argue that Wal-Mart Stores, having replaced General Motors as the nation's largest company, has an obligation to treat its employees better.

Articles like this demonstrate why companies like Wal-Mart have such a strong desire to go robotic. With robots running the stores instead of humans, all of these pay issues fall away. Plus, the store can stay open 24 hours a day. And customer service will actually get better.

The article Robots in 2015 argues that the robotic Wal-Mart is just not that far away. From the article:

In 2015, at about the same time that the airlines are laying off all of their pilots, Wal-Mart or Target or some other large retailer will be introducing a totally automated inventory management system. Every shelf will be fitted with RFID tags, allowing a mobile pick-and-place robot to find the exact shelf location of every product in the store. Every individual product in the warehouse will also be fitted with an RFID tag, so the robot will be able to pick up and identify every product that it needs to shelve. A relatively simple computer vision system will allow the robot to stack items on the shelves. These inventory management robots will operate 24-hours-a-day shuttling merchandise from the back of the store onto the shelves as items are sold. The robots will also constantly straighten the shelves and re-shelve merchandise. All of the technology needed to do this is nearly in place today.

By 2015, every big box retailer will be using automated checkout lines. Robotic help systems will guide shoppers in the stores. The automated inventory management robots will allow the first retailer to lay off a huge percentage of its employees. Competitive pressure will force Wal-mart, K-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, BJ's, Sam's Club, Toys R Us, Sears, J.C. Penny's, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Kroger's, Winn-Dixie, Pet Depot and so on to adopt the same robotic inventory systems in their stores. The entire transition will happen in just five years or so. Any company that does not automate will be at such a pricing disadvantage that it will go out of business. Ten million unemployed workers dumped onto the job market over the course of five years will have a profound effect on the unemployment statistics in the United States.

The article Robots to help out blind shoppers discusses a new robot for the blind, saying, "Computer scientists in the US have developed a robot that could help blind people to shop or find their way around large buildings. It uses radio frequency identification tags to locate items and a laser range finder to avoid collisions." That very same technology is what will guide the restocking robots in the stores.

At about the same time, the robotic technology being developed in the Grand Challenge will be bearing fruit, and one to two million truck drivers will be becoming unemployed.

At about the same time, Robotic call centers will be eliminating most of the call center jobs that remain in the U.S.

And so on...

See Robots in 2015 and Robotic Nation for details.