SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Walmart To Test Self-Driving Cars For Grocery Pickup Service
The future is here and soon it will be toting grocery shoppers around Phoenix. Walmart and Waymo — formerly Google's self-driving car project — announced on Wednesday the launch of a pilot program that will allow consumers to make their grocery pickups with the help of an autonomous vehicle.
The plan is simple. Participants in Waymo's "early riders" program will be able to take a driverless shuttle service to and from Walmart whenever they purchase groceries from Walmart.com using the retailer's online grocery pickup service.
Current "early riders" will receive incentives to participate in the pilot and the rides will be provided with no additional cost, Molly Blakeman, a Walmart spokesperson, said in an email to NPR. "Since the pilot is part of our Grocery Pickup program, personal shoppers pick customers' orders and bring them right out to the car ... in this case a Waymo self-driving car," she said.
Related: Google/Waymo Announces Testing of Self-Driving Trucks in Atlanta, Georgia
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 28 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
Kroger already has a service called ClickList where they do the same thing, so I'm sure the concept has been reviewed by now. Incidentally, they are also testing driverless grocery delivery [cnbc.com], except they'll bring it to your door.
That's what I thought this was going to be about when I first spotted it. Walmart already does delivery to the home ("in some markets" [walmart.com]), so I wonder why they want to pick people up, bring them to the store, and then immediately send them back. Get them into the physical store and you can entice them to buy junk with all of the psychological tricks that have been used by retailers for decades.
What is the point of adding the online shopper to this driverless pickup process? "Personal shoppers pick customers' orders and bring them right out to the car". Presumably they can load those orders into the trunk, and then send the car on its merry way with no passengers in it. You could design the car to be "100% trunk space" if it is not meant to have passengers, and Walmart doesn't face any liability from passengers getting hurt if there are no passengers (we'll ignore the pedestrians and other vehicles for now, since they can be affected whether or not there are passengers inside the delivery vehicle). The only thing I can think of is that having a human inside becomes a theft deterrent. But another solution to that problem would be to deploy the service only "in some markets" yet again.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday July 29 2018, @04:20AM
Oh the concept has been reviewed, and ~85% of consumers said they won't buy groceries online because they want to pick out items in-person [qz.com].
It's the biggest thing that makes perishable grocery stores different from just about every other trend in retail moving online.