SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Kroger launches autonomous grocery delivery service in Arizona
Starting today, residents of Scottsdale, Arizona have the opportunity to receive autonomous grocery deliveries from Fry's Food Stores—a brand owned by grocery giant Kroger. The technology is supplied by Nuro, a self-driving vehicle startup founded by two veterans of Google's self-driving car project. We profiled the company in May.
Kroger says that deliveries will have a flat $5.95 delivery fee, and customers can schedule same-day or next-day deliveries. Initially, the deliveries will be made by Nuro's fleet of modified Toyota Priuses with a safety driver behind the wheel. But Kroger expects to start using Nuro's production model—which doesn't even have space for a driver—this fall.
Kroger is the United States's largest supermarket chain by revenue, the second-largest general retailer (behind Walmart), and the eighteenth largest company in the United States.
Previously: An Unmanned Car May Soon Deliver Your Kroger Groceries
Related: Walmart and Waymo to Trial Driverless Shuttle Service in Phoenix for Grocery Pickups
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 20 2018, @03:07PM
The shelves, even in a warehouse, must be stocked and trucks must be offloaded. (Amazon doesn't use robot pickers for reasons). You lose parking and security and gain the delivery expense of the delivery mechanism, automated or not. You lose cashiers but are now paying more developers to maintain the automated routines to maintenance the kiosk or web store (and I've always had enough ongoing problems with the self-serve checkouts and that is now old tech). You might know what you want but new paradigms must be made for the product makers to pay you to feature their specific brand of the bananas and chips they want you to buy (never heard of corporate payments to get end-cap, preferred product row, or checkout line space? It's a significant component of store income.) Robots might cost less but you have much larger upfront development and deployment cost.
To the bean counters it is matching up when all the expense-income-loan-profit curves are right in order to try it. That's all.
And finally, drones and robot cars need to stop killing individual pedestrians before they will be accepted, no matter if they are safer or not. I wonder if self-drive vehicles are now becoming a bubble - pure guesswork but MVHO is there's too buch buzz and hype on them.
Even then there are those of us who might be luddites (I'm not, actually) who may have ethical reservations about further disruptions that cost more worker jobs than are gained in the process.
Or I could be wrong.
This sig for rent.