Walmart to add more robots as it struggles with online retail

Walmart is all set to add thousands of robots while humans will help the customers. The local retailers have been hit hard by some of the online retailers like Amazon. Walmart has its own online presence and believes that it has got a solution to the decreasing sales figures. The giant has also come out with a solution that robots can take care of the mundane jobs like cleaning up the spills while its staff spends time helping the customers.

The online retailer announced on April 9, 2019 that it is all set to deploy 1,500 new Auto-C autonomous floor cleaners, 300 Auto-S shelf scanners and an additional 1,200 FAST unloaders that will scan and sort items as they come off delivery trucks. Moreover, to streamline online orders it will have 900 Pickup Towers so the customers can order something on the company’s site and just pick it up from a vending machine at the nearest Walmart.

The company has an aim to push the menial tasks to the robots while the human employees at Walmart can spend more time handling the customers and preparing online orders for pickup. Reports say that the company has been testing the robots for a few months now. John Crecelius, the senior vice president at Central operations for Walmart said, “Our associates immediately understood the opportunity for the new technology to free them up from focusing on tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual”. Relieving the employees to attend the customers is a good idea as nobody likes to be the in charge of the clean up on the aisle seven.

At the same time there are also concerns that such machine assistants could replace the existing employees, instead of moving them to a more customer-facing position. We hope that the employees and the robots work in harmony to create a perfect environment for the customers and help the company to increase sales.

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