Walmart looks to undercut Amazon with new robotic employees
Walmart is expanding its network of friendly store robots.
Robotic employees have been roaming the aisles of Walmart stores in Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and California for the past three years. The retail corporation told CNN that the program is expanding to locations in El Paso and Fort Worth in Texas, and Jacksonville, Florida.
The bots will arrive by the end of January, and will expand Walmart's program to cover 50 stores in total. The expansion should be little surprise to anyone familiar with the retail-giant sphere: Walmart has spent the past few years doing everything and anything it can to speed up its infrastructure and beat back Amazon.
Customer interaction is one of the primary ways in which Walmart will always edge out its faceless online rival. Delegating menial tasks such as scanning for mislabeled items to machines allows humans more time to focus on customer experience, according to the company.
"We're really excited by the potential to give people more time to serve our customers, something they tell us is the best part of working in retail," a Walmart spokesperson told Mashable.
Many of Walmart's recent innovations have aimed to remove the human element from the mundane aspects of retail. In July, it rolled out giant vending machines to dispense pickup orders for customers, eliminating the need for human sorting and delivery. In June, it tested a self-serve grocery kiosk in one of its Oklahoma stores.
Walmart's retail robots are tame compared to their peers. A startup recently created an army of robots to zoom around its warehouse and shop for its customers. And robots in a fully automated sorting plant in China can sort through thousands of packages at terrifying speeds.
Still, Walmart insists its robots are here to assist employees, not to replace them. So if you live in Texas or Florida, be prepared to encounter robots in the coming months, but don't worry about your job ... yet.
Topics Amazon Artificial Intelligence
Monica wrote for Mashable's Tech section with a focus on retail, internet of things, and the intersections of technology and social justice. She holds a degree in creative writing from Brown University, and has previously written for Dow Jones Media, the New York Post, Yahoo Finance, and others. In her free time, she can be found attempting to cook Asian food, buying board games, and looking for new hobbies.
