unskilled warehouse workers.
It’s ironic to call them unskilled in an article describing how their skills are beyond billion-dollar robots.
Unskilled, but none of the managers I had (not WM, mid size mail order company) could keep up. All of them had broken racking, run the forks through walls, and/or torn dock doors off. They were slow, and would put bad pallets in the racks.
So the company liked doing cutting edge corporate stuff and reading books about various CEOs. One time they had us take skill surveys (thinly veiled IQ tests) to optimize new hires. The first batch was based off the high performance people and all quit after two weeks because they were smart enough to know bullshit. The second group was based off the long timers and also didn’t last because they were dumb as rocks. After that they went back to shotgunning everyone at it and seeing what sticks. Open interviews, always posted.
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Unskilled means can get someone to do it for minimum wage 🫢
It doesn’t mean it’s only worth minimum wage to the company.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. All labor requires myriad skills. At best, some jobs are easier than others, for some people.
All references to “skilled” labor are somber reminders of centuries worth of capitalist propaganda implemented solely to underpay workers.
The length of training required for a job is irrelevant. Some jobs may require years of training for a repeatable mechanical task, like watchmaking. Others may let the worker pop off on day one with virtually no guardrails or training, like landscaping. Both (all) jobs are difficult, and both (all) workers deserve respect.
Do not call work skilled or unskilled, because it is not true, and such labels accomplish nothing other than forwarding bourgeoise interests.
100% agree. I work in the nuclear sector and jobs can literally be walk around and make sure nothing is on fire but its considered “skilled labor.”
Walmart is technically competent, but more pragmatic than adventurous. In the past, it has often favored proven systems that deliver reliable returns over expensive, leading-edge alternatives. That has been a smart business strategy for them for the most part, even if they are sometimes late to the party when it comes to innovation.
Amazon has made robotics a core part of its fulfillment model. Ocado designed its grocery fulfillment operation around automation from the outset. This meant major investment in infrastructure, software, and process redesign.
Walmart has invested heavily in robotics, too, but its approach has been more incremental and constrained by the need to modernize an enormous existing network. A bolt-on, if you will.
So I suspect Walmart’s problems are partly about its approach and baggage, not the state of robotics. They’ll figure it out eventually.
Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.
The system designers get tripped up by the strangest things. I once worked in a factory that uses copper bars of varying lengths, and the designer didn’t expect the bars to ‘sag’ when picked up flatwise from the middle. So I can imagine picking up a bag of dog food would do that.
That’s a bad engineer problem. Tasks must be reduced to absolute minimums, and operating scenarios must be maximized. Otherwise failure conditions will win.
They might have underestimated the mix of items. From bagged dog food with 20kg, boxes of all shapes down to small poly‘s is hard to handle. For picking robots as well as the sorting AGV‘s.
Amazon didn’t robotize its entire item spectrum yet, as far as I know. It focus on robotizable items.
If such a heavy dog food bag brakes, all the small pieces lie on the floor that those dumb AGV‘s drive upon. That’s immediately causing clogged wheels and even more. And to clean the mess up, one has to stop the entire AGV area as it’s not safe for humans to enter. One broken dog food bag can cause some expensive maintenance and drives operational costs up. 1 broken bag per month can likely kill your business case.
It’s one of the great ironies of our time that we spend billions on slop machines but haven’t yet been able to build a robot that can empty the dishwasher.
You can bet your tushy that whichever middle-manager came up with the idea of spending all that money to reduce reliance on human workers, has already picked up a hefty bonus, used a golden parachute, and is now scamming their way through another giant corporate to repeat the same shit with a different idiotic idea.
So instead of hiring actual people again, they’ll look for cheaper engineers and robots.
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814
https://retailboss.substack.com/p/krogers-350-million-lesson-why-big
I work at a Kroger owned store. For whatever reason they decided to give that another try at my store and another one in the same division. We’re all very sceptical… since you know it already failed before but it’s better than the robot “Tally” which drives around and checks for empty spots on shelves. The poor grocery guys are supposed to then go around and face em despite already being tight on people
The same items at my local Ralphs (Kroger) are constantly (like 4+ years) out of stock because they just face over the holes. Whoever is putting inventory into the computer must absolutely suck too because this shouldn’t even be happening; but having worked at Walmart I’ve seen firsthand how people roll their eyes when the numbers are off.
I’ve been told that it’s mostly automated. IE the Point Of Sale tells the system what items were sold and it subtracts from whatever total it has. The produce guys have said that because of this system some things like bananas are almost always screwed up, cause the barcode and the PLU (the numbers) aren’t actually the same item. Namely sometimes when the banana suppler changes they don’t get automatically ordered cause the system thinks we’re selling the old ones which “don’t exist anymore”. I’d expect similar things happen to grocery and home but to a much less extent, probably from people just tossing stuff out instead of scanning it out and then still just tossing it. Yay food waste.
They do quarter, semi annually, or anual inventories to true up the numbers
“We’ll pay billions in trying to automate things to avoid paying a few million for human employees.”
As a forklift monkey: I hate my job and feel that humans weren’t meant for this monotonous kind of work. Like boomers who screwed in one nut on an assembly line who made enough to provide a family of 4, I’d blow my brains out before I’d do that. So fuck these jobs.
Yeah, the problem isn’t automation, it’s billionaires pocketing all of the proceeds.
Robots are more expensive and are less capable than people? What a surprise! Not. I saw that coming years ago… 🙄
Unfortunately the robots are substantially faster and more effective than humans. Can you run at ~45 mph?
The issue is complexity and that’s something that’s getting better over time.
Complexity is expensive.
Expensive isn’t really an issue though is it?
If I can guarantee you quadruple your revenue by doubling your expense, you’d take the deal no? That’s basically what these things do.
To be a bit more precise, is it about throughput or lead time? Because for throughput I imagine you can just have more workers, but for quicker shipping you need to do pick and pack in less time, rather than do a lot of them in a given time.
Throughput primarily, the bottleneck is still shipping. These systems do allow for picking/packing faster as well but from a logistics standpoint if you want more output you just need more trucks.
How does it help in getting more revenue then? Demand wouldn’t change, right?
Businesses tend to bank on demand for products being functionally infinite over the long term. Because of this it tends to be a safe bet that you’ll make more money the quicker, and cheaper, you can get products on shelves.
This has held pretty true thus far, though personally I have to wonder if there’s an upper limit. Human’s have to have a upper tolerance for buying junk right?
My stand up Jack can go just as fast. The problem isn’t top speed, it’s acceleration and breaking. It’s being able to rip around a warehouse building orders quickly and efficiently. A dude with a stand up Jack and a voxcoder can beat most robots.
Ever notice that the top end speed of the non riding ones, the ones that you walk behind, us just a little beyond a comfortable walking pace? Always found that curious. Not quite running, but certainly not walking either. Hips would hurt at the end of a shift.
Link to the original article. Oh wait it’s WSJ slop.
Remember when the disclaimer “please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery” was practically ubiquitous on mail order packages? It’s almost like that was a SANE way to run a logistics network!
Worked at a place that got obsessed with same or next day shipping. It was clearly killing employee morale and we weren’t selling anything that people needed that quickly. Make a special premium instant ship or something for the people having an emergency but not for everyone. The killer for me was that they were at times doing mandatory overtime during the week and then sending you home early on your required weekend shift so you could have the suck of getting your evenings and schedules killed but without the extra pay.
We don’t send pieces of paper back and forth with days long transit time to complete an order anymore.
Anyone who has tried to automate anything beyond the most basic step quickly finds out how difficult it is to truly do it with all of the boundary conditions, bad inputs, breaking conditions, etc.
