How automation destroys Walmart employees

For top managers of the largest US supermarket chain, the introduction of Auto-C automatic floor cleaner seemed like a logical development for retail. Two years ago, they allocated several hundred million to it. Still: such an assistant is able to eliminate a human error, reduce costs, increase the speed / quality of cleaning and, in the future, conduct a mini-revolution in American super-stores.

But among the workers of Walmart No. 937 in Marietta, Georgia, the revolutionary device received a different name - Freddy. By the name of the cleaner that the store fired the day before Auto-C was added to the network.

The career of the new Freddy in the supermarket from the very beginning did not work out. The tin worker regularly received “nervous breakdowns”, departed from the paved route, he constantly needed new adjustments, sometimes he had to conduct “training” several times a week, and call specialists to set him up.

Buyers also did not know how to react to the advent of the new Freddy. One of Walmart’s employees, Evan Tanner, recalls how one night a man fell asleep on top of a car, and she obediently carried him to the toy department.

Company executives are skeptical of such stories. They say Auto-C is smarter than you might think. If someone interferes with his work, he will stop and give a signal so as not to waste extra energy. But Tanner claims that Freddie was zealously spinning around the supermarket until someone pulled a sleeping person off him.

Over the past 50 years, Walmart has repeatedly changed the way Americans live. Tens of thousands of cleaning up small shops, rebuilding small cities to please themselves, creating new opportunities for work and shopping. Now the company is launching the biggest revolution of all, launching thousands of robots - scanners, cleaners, conveyor shippers, smart cameras and vending machines for delivering online purchases from its growing online business. A giant experiment that will show how people - workers and buyers - are comfortable communicating with robots in the real world. And does it increase real sales.

Earlier, we talked about how the company installed Auto-C robot breakers in 360 of its stores for the sake of experiment. Then the experiment was recognized as successful - and increased their number to 1860. Already next year Walmart plans to introduce them to all supermarkets in the country.

To make the new technology faster, the company first said that new robots would not affect the lives of real employees. And if they do, they will even improve! Now they will only have creative work that cannot be automated (such as selecting bad apples, guarding, communicating with customers, helping them in choosing products, meat and fish). The employees will have more free time and it will be more pleasant for them to do their job!

But we already see that this is not so. A successful Walmart experiment shows that one machine can replace at least three to four people - such as Freddy. Within Walmart, this is about a million lost jobs. But in total, according to McKinsey’s estimates, by 2030, from 400 to 800 million people will be forced to change their jobs because of robots.

The Rise of the Machines at Walmart, workers say, gave an unexpected side effect. They feel that their work has actually become even more monotonous. Focus on robots and this whole new paradigm makes managers think about "hyper-optimization". Every step, every sneeze, every movement should be accurate and debugged. And if not, the cameras record everything. Part of the work that employees found relaxing (filling shelves, scanning products, the same floor cleaning behind the wheel of a cool unit) now goes to robots. And people get, according to the workers, more "exhausting" labor.

It also does not help the fact that many employees feel that their most important task now is to monitor their fellow robots. To clean, repair, nurse and train those who will one day lose their jobs.

For buyers, it all depends on how attractive the car is. With Auto-C breakdowns, everything is fine with them so far (you see, they even sleep on them). But Auto-S scanners, they say, scare many. Such a long two-meter giraffe, slowly and noiselessly leaving the shelf, introduces many into a state of stupor. They are also quietly kicked and beaten, especially by young people. Like, what is it blocking the passage, this stupid robot.

Although this machine has already lived 200 years in total, took more than 5 billion images and traveled more than 45,000 kilometers between the Walmart counters, and remembers hundreds of thousands of meetings with visitors, many customers see something like this for the first time, and the thing seems too funny to them to just pass by.

Auto-S Shelf Checker

Employees of a dozen new “automated” supermarkets told reporters that the machines help them well, and they are also nice. Almost everywhere they were given names. Someone spoke about the nature of robots - someone is "angry", someone is "funny." Someone - basically complained that the introduction of robots accelerated the overall pace of work, and now for the most part they are constantly responding to alerts sent to them by machines, which is not very fun.

Walmart’s management team said the reaction to the robots among the employees was “extremely positive,” and compares its cars with the R2-D2 Star Wars droid and Optimus Prime transformer. “Every hero needs a sidekick,” they say to the workers. “And now you have some of the best.”

Our mechanical overlords

Robots do not complain, do not require promotion, do not need holidays and breaks. At a shareholders meeting in August, company president Doug McMillon said that these machines are the company's main hope and how it sees itself in the future. Walmart's annual revenue is $ 514 billion. And net profit is only $ 6.7 billion. The introduction of robots will make these two figures a little closer to each other.

We test and scale new automation technologies. This is an important, decisive time. Our specific cost management plans are vital.

The scale is really impressive. One Walmart in Levittown (50 thousand inhabitants) to support all robots and cameras has 100 servers, 10 cooling tower systems, 400 graphic cards and 50,000 meters of cables. All this allows AI-systems to manage the store, in fact, instead of managers. Cameras and weight sensors automatically detect if shopping baskets will soon be missed, some label is wrong, and bananas will soon become overripe.

Further, if AI feels a problem, it sends a signal to, in fact, a smartphone, which should be in the hands of every employee. And he displays what he needs to do now. Go collect carts in some part of the store. Replenish stocks of apples. Go update the labels. The supermarket employs about 100 people who do all the physical work.

Such gadgets should be in the hands of all employees of the "advanced" Walmart

Employees at this “advanced” store complain that they constantly feel humiliated. A soulless robot knows and understands everything better than they do. Previously, each supermarket had a manager to whom it was possible to go with questions, but now the system makes all the basic decisions. Previously, each Walmart was slightly different in character from everyone else, depending on the people who were in charge of it, now everyone who has such an AI platform works identically. "Soulless." Dismissal or departure, some joke, is like "promotion to the buyer."

Man is needed only at the most primitive stages. And everyone understands this. Floor cleaners - especially. One described all his bitterness when Auto-C was brought to their store. At the first stage, the machine still does not know how to clean the floor. She needs to remember the layout of the store. Therefore, the first few days, the future former cleaner drives her by hand. Trains where the shelves, where the counters, where the box office, what places to go around. And then he gets fired.

Next time, such a “driver” will be needed only if the supermarket is rebuilt abruptly, changing everything inside, which happens no more than once every few years.

Household hatred of robots is said to be ubiquitous. Some employees admit that they called them names and materials using their new, human names, such as Emma, ​​Bender, or Frank. Moreover, expressions were chosen even more serious than if it were a skirmish between two employees.

World with cars

Martin Hitch, head of Walmart’s Bossa Nova Robotics, said the company spent several years trying to teach robots to be as friendly to people as possible. But in the world there are no agreed etiquette rules telling how people and machines should interact.

Engineers, for example, did not want the robot to quietly appear in the room, scaring people. No one needs a lawsuit against a heart attack. But what sound should he announce about himself? They tested several thousand options, from the comical beep-beep to the booming noise of a forklift. As a result, we settled on a pleasant but persistent twittering - several bird songs, of which they edited one.

“The last thing you want from him is to say. Because if he speaks, people think that they can speak in response. ”

Signals that seemed obvious and understandable to human testers were completely useless in the real world. For example, when a company put turn signals on a test robot, it only confused people. No one expected to see the flickering lights, being bought by dumplings. And then respond to them as if you were at a crossroads. For children and people with low vision, this solution was also far from ideal.

A look into the future

Walmart claims that through robots, employee turnover has fallen to its lowest level in 5 years. Plus - 40,000 workers are now in positions that did not exist 2 years ago. At the same time, full-fledged company employees in the USA now receive an average of $ 14.26 per hour, which is higher than the industry average.

But many talk about the boredom that automation brings. Robots took some simple pleasures from employees, such as walking around the store, and now people have only small, inconsequential, dumb tasks. The same thing, they say, earlier happened with the introduction of self-service cash registers. Many cashiers were left without work, but employees should still be present to help confused customers, eliminate glitches and reassure the machine if it gives a signal about a problem.

Michael Webb, an economist at Stanford University who studies the impact of AI on labor markets, said that it was no accident that technology found its first use in the real world in supermarkets. These large companies are volume dependent. Even a minimal improvement for them has huge consequences. Saving $ 1,000 per month at every store in a couple of years for Walmart turns into hundreds of millions. Investing in robots and artificial intelligence can quickly come true.

Small supermarket chains, Webb says, will get this technology much later. A high-level stores with expensive goods, most likely, will not switch to robots ever. “The fact that you are being served by people is a special privilege and service for which you will now have to pay extra.”

For Tanner, a Walmart employee in Marietta, where the new mechanical Freddy is working, automation has changed almost everything. He used to be a department manager in the toy section. Now he mainly cares for robots. After their appearance, the store several times reduced the number of employees, especially among those who previously unloaded trucks and checked the shelves. Basically, Tanner performs routine tasks to which the hands of the machines have not yet reached.

“Everything has been monotonous in the store since they came here. Solid monotonous work. I think I'm slowly losing my mind, ”he says.

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