Walmart has plans to expand its use of in-store robots to perform such tasks as cleaning floors, unloading trucks and managing inventory this year.
“Our associates immediately understood the opportunity for the new technology to free them up from focusing on tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual,” John Crecelius, senior vice president of central operations for Walmart U.S., commented in the blog. “It allows them time to focus more on selling merchandise and serving customers, which they tell us have always been the most exciting parts of working in retail.”
The company said in a blog post Tuesday that the robots and automated units, currently in just a few locations, perform such functions as checking inventory, store maintenance, sorting products and fulfilling online orders, enabling store associates to spend more time serving customers on the sales floor.
It will have approximately 1,500 more autonomous floor cleaners (known as Auto-C), 300 new shelf scanners (Auto-S), 1,200 additional FAST Unloaders and 900 more Pickup Towers.
Walmart began testing the Auto-S shelf scanning robots at a small number of stores in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and California in 2017.
As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart is competing with Amazon’s physical retail space, selling perishable goods, like its Whole Foods acquisition.
A new report from Cowen & Co. estimates that curbside grocery pickup will account for $35 billion in sales in the United States by 2020 as it is embraced by a greater proportion of consumers.
Cowen analysts estimated that Walmart grocery pickup is contributing significantly to the retailer’s overall U.S. comparable sales growth. They forecast Walmart’s U.S. comparable sales will increase 2.8 percent for the current fiscal year from the prior year, and that grocery pickup will account for between 0.9 and 1.3 percentage points.
Amazon has two locations of AmazonFresh Pickup in Seattle, a drive-up spot for retrieving groceries. Its Whole Foods Market chain has rolled out click-and-collect services in 22 cities. And it provides pickup centers and lockers.
Other contenders are Kroger and Target.
Amazon is relatively new to the space, but has become the leader in the “click-and-collect” retail strategy.
Overall Amazon and Walmart stand above other food retailers as “geniuses” in online grocery, according to Gartner L2’s Grocery U.S. 2019 Digital IQ Index. The only two grocery retailers achieving the Genius level in this year’s index, Amazon and Walmart earned respective scores of 144 and 140.
Online grocery players making the Gifted tier included Target (score of 139), Kroger (134), H-E-B (127), Sam’s Club (125), Walgreens (124), CVS Pharmacy (119), Whole Foods Market (119), Publix (113), ShopRite (112), Safeway (111), Instacart (110) and Thrive Market (110).
“Digital grocery still only makes up a small portion of total sales in the U.S., but it’s the leading driver of growth in an industry with famously narrow margins. However, customers are hesitant to buy their groceries online, and consistent survey data identifies concerns about product freshness and price as the main obstacles,” Gartner L2 said in the Grocery U.S. 2019 Digital IQ Index report.