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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 snufu on Monday August 20 2018, @12:50PM (4 children)
This is a no-brainer. I know what chips and bananas I want. Cut out the retail space, shelf stockers, cashiers, parking, security, etc. Use a centralized warehouse with autonomous cars/drone delivery. Is the robot tech still not there despite the endless hype over the last decade?
(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.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday August 20 2018, @03:33PM (1 child)
Cost of labor. This type of service exists overseas (I've seen it in China specifically); there are companies which will purchase and hand deliver something for you via motorcycle courier.
Now, to replace with robots is a completely different story. Robots are good at repeatable standardized actions. Product selection, purchase, and delivery is probably some of the most difficult tasks to automate.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 20 2018, @06:36PM
Kroger already has ClickList employees, who receive your online order, shop for you, and carry the groceries to your car when you arrive. Presumably they will be involved with this scheme, and even utilized to a greater extent if more people do online orders with this new option.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 20 2018, @06:53PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmazonFresh [wikipedia.org]
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/14/news/companies/walmart-online-grocery-delivery/index.html [cnn.com]
It's coming. However, there is no full-scale, non-test deployment of autonomous cars for such a purpose. And Amazon has yet to eliminate its warehouse workers by replacing them all with Amazonk Prometheans. Although neither is needed for you to get fresh grocery delivery. You don't see the workers, whether or not they are stressed [theverge.com] humans [businessinsider.com] or bots. And if a human driver delivers groceries, they can unload and leave, so you don't have to unload the car or the delivery service doesn't need a much more complicated robot to unload.
Maybe delivery will become cheaper once autonomous cars can lower per-mile costs. But you can still get delivery in many locations right now.
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