Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs.  humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item.  that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in would  dedicate more than one full-time staff to do this.  if the robot is working 24hrs, it's doing the hours of three full-time staff and probably the work of six.  That's a huge jump in the amount of stock checking that's happening at a store.<p>So i wonder why wal-mart is investing in robots to fill <i>this</i> role, when there are so many other important jobs that they could automate instead.  and the answer i land on is that the quantity-on-hand <i>is</i> critically important if you're using the store as a warehouse for a local delivery operation.  If you've advertised something as in-stock for same-day delivery on your website, and then you let customers in to browse around your warehouse and move things around, having roaming scanners checking for mis-homed items is suddenly a lot more important.