Walmart Is Reportedly Developing a Store of the Future with No Cashiers

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,003
Walmart is exploring an in-store shopping experience without checkout lines or cashiers, called Project Kepler, according to Recode. The retail giant is also testing a high-end delivery service, as it looks to compete with Amazon in an e-commerce focused world.

Multiple people familiar with the project tell Recode that one goal of the initiative is the creation of physical stores that would operate without checkout lines or cashiers — in a similar fashion to Amazon’s futuristic Amazon Go store, which was announced a year ago but has yet to open to the public.
 
1513890017wiwvwi43w4_1_1.jpg


Dang, Kyle put on some weight.
 
In my area (part of what is commonly called "fly over America") people line up in long lines at the Walmart Neighborhood Market for the 2 human checkouts rather than using one of the fifteen or twenty self check aisles that are always empty except when I come in.

Sorry Walmart but don't leave your roots behind to try and move upscale, your current users "ain't" rocket scientists and you aren't Amazon. :rolleyes:
 
wait don't they already do this, lol? the only actual cashier they ever have is the lane they sell tobacco products at.

RealBeast said:
In my area (part of what is commonly called "fly over America") people line up in long lines at the Walmart Neighborhood Market for the 2 human checkouts rather than using one of the fifteen or twenty self check aisles that are always empty except when I come in.

Sorry Walmart but don't leave your roots behind to try and move upscale, your current users "ain't" rocket scientists and you aren't Amazon. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

yeah it's like that here as well but people tend to live small town life style even though there's over 300k people that live here where they'd rather get checked out by a real person then some piece of technology.. changing to no checkouts will fail miserably in cities/towns like mine. not to mention the fact that a huge portion of walmarts customer base is on welfare or state provided food stamps and aren't allowed to use self checkout when using EBT cards or food stamp coupons..
 
Last edited:
Walmart actually had a really good self checkout machines. Accurate and fast. That was until they updated the software and GUI to be "modern". Now it has lots of lag. Also, with all things getting the "modern" look, the buttons on the screen arent very visible because it blends in with the rest of the screen.
 
The problem isn't really the cashiers, its stupid customers who wait until the get to the cashier before they start asking idiotic questions about coupons or even worst when they pull out their checkbook. That is why self checkout goes so much faster since it tends to eliminate those people from using them.
 
The Walmarts that I go to always have long lines where the cashiers are at. And as others have mentioned, the self checkout lanes are most of the time available. Unfortunately the POS systems are very slow, so it would seem going to the cashier would be faster, lol.
It's pretty obvious that technology is turning in this direction, eventually eliminating the employees. It's sad. I guess that's why the tech heads in silicone valley have those nice bunkers to hide in just in case they have an angry mob coming after them.
 
Cashiers are one of the main reasons I try and buy everything online.
I have run into some of the stupidest people on the earth every time i go shopping local.
I have accepted and come to the conclusion that I just hate people.
 
bugleyman said:
This technology will have to get way, Way, WAY better before a store like this will fly. The current "cashier-less" POS systems are a complete mess.
Click to expand...
The tech has come a long way. I used one recently at wallyworld along with everyone else and no one had a problem.
My total was $59.72 and the money machine took a 50 and a 20 and spit out the correct change.
There was one employee on hand in case someone did have an issue, she looked bored.
 
Jim Kim said:
The tech has come a long way. I used one recently at wallyworld along with everyone else and no one had a problem.
My total was $59.72 and the money machine took a 50 and a 20 and spit out the correct change.
There was one employee on hand in case someone did have an issue, she looked bored.
Click to expand...

Last time I tried to use it, it expected me to heft every damn 24-pack of water out of the cart and onto the "bagging area." The whole notion of weighing everything you buy as a means of theft prevention is daft. YMMV.
 
So in an age where everything is automated, what about the people, eh? What about the jobs lost to all those people displaced by the automation, eh? Will prices come down overall to account for the lack of job income lost to those displaced jobs? Or will those companies that won't have to front employee pay and benefits and everything else related to having actual Humans on the payroll ever translate to anything of benefit to society itself instead of just the handful of wealthy company owners and the companies supplying the automated machinery?

This is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and yet it will create new problems just the same.
 
bugleyman said:
Last time I tried to use it, it expected me to heft every damn 24-pack of water out of the cart and onto the "bagging area." The whole notion of weighing everything you buy as a means of theft prevention is daft. YMMV.
Click to expand...
System I used was just scan and bag, previously it was scan/weigh/bag.
But yeah, I could see issues with multiple bulk items like water, pet food etc.

Tiberian said:
Will prices come down overall to account for the lack of job income lost to those displaced jobs?
Click to expand...
Hell no.
The rich will get richer, it is the way of the world.
 
I take offense having worked in retail and been a checker, usually its the crazy customer requests that slow checkstands down.

Its the people trying to quadruple coupons that say 1 per household, stacking coupona that don't stack or make clerks run around to fetch things that freeze the lines.

Self check out is fine if the systems are quick and your not buying big stuff, those same customers are either setting off the calling associate function or arguing with the machine.

Luckily I am swift and have a strong retail background so I don't have these issues.
 
Jim Kim said:
System I used was just scan and bag, previously it was scan/weigh/bag.
But yeah, I could see issues with multiple bulk items like water, pet food etc.
Click to expand...

Good to know...if they ditched the weight thing I may have to give it another try.
 
Tiberian said:
So in an age where everything is automated, what about the people, eh? What about the jobs lost to all those people displaced by the automation, eh? Will prices come down overall to account for the lack of job income lost to those displaced jobs? Or will those companies that won't have to front employee pay and benefits and everything else related to having actual Humans on the payroll ever translate to anything of benefit to society itself instead of just the handful of wealthy company owners and the companies supplying the automated machinery?

This is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and yet it will create new problems just the same.
Click to expand...

That's a huge understatement! :p

The disappearing value of labor in an increasing automated world will remake society...we just don't know how yet!
 
I love the self checkout lanes at Walmart. I am in and out at least twice as fast than had I used a cashier line. I have never had an issue with them not working right or being slow or laggy.
 
Expecting to be able to walk into a store, grab an item off the shelf, then walk out with it automagically being charged (or prearranged) and with as little human interaction as possible. Prime has more or less made b&m store a thing of the past for me, but if I'm already out and about, you cannot beat instant.
 
In the future there will 4 available job categories, Student monitoring for K through 12th-grade classrooms (the actual teaching will be done by a robot), Engineering (mainly software and mechanical), Doctors and prostitution. Everyone else will be living on government subsidies.


bugleyman said:
That's a huge understatement! :p

The disappearing value of labor in an increasing automated world will remake society...we just don't know how yet!
Click to expand...

Watch Wall-E
 
They already are close. I avoid Walmart like its an infection already and rarely go but whenever I do and I walk past the 70 handicapped spaces of which maybe 4 are occupied..... I get what I need and go to checkout and out of the 40 cash registers there are generally maybe two to four that actually have a cashier (always the tobacco line as already mentioned) and those of course have lines with a dozen people or more in each. I just do not quite understand it I guess. Have they ever manned every register all at once before? Maybe on black friday opening and that is it? I would not know as I'm damn sure not going there then. What are the odds that 70 handicapped people are all going to show up all at the same time? I've never seen that myself unless there is some sort of convention happening but again, I just found its best that I avoid the Walmart stores if at all possible.
 
  • Like
Reactions: drklu
like this
Wal Mart needs to invent a technology that will manage to keep more than three cashiers working the 30 check out lines they have in every store.

The self checkout lines added were initially pretty awesome, until the average Wal Mart Shopper found out they existed, and are so fucking incompetent that they need a damned cashier to walk them through how to scan an item. So instead of being able to walk up and scan a single item, pay and get the hell out of there as fast as possible, you get to sit behind an idiot who is taking 10 minutes to scan three items.
 
My Walmart doesn't have any self check out. At most there only 4 open. One being express. With other for tobacco stuff and maybe two normal lines.
 
Tried the Walmart self checkout once. Scan spray paint <Beep> Cashier over ride needed for >18 age needed.[Wait] A few items later, scan carb cleaner <Beep> Cashier over ride needed for >18 year age needed(Worried I got too young in the last 6 items?)[Wait], a few items later, scan large item <Beep> Please put item in sack(like I need still more plastic bags at the house.)[puzzle out how to make it happy]. Took longer to complete the self checkout then it would have to wait in the normal checkout lanes.
 
bugleyman said:
This technology will have to get way, Way, WAY better before a store like this will fly. The current "cashier-less" POS systems are a complete mess.
Click to expand...

They work great for me. My only issue with them is that they don't work well for certain items. However, one cashier for a quad or so of self-checkout registers seems to work well for dealing with this.

Of course people are going to scream and rant about this but I think it was inevitable. People think cashiers should make enough money to support a family on instead of it being a type of transitory job you have early on in your life before getting into a real career. Minimum wage keeps getting bumped up and now it's reached a point where a huge investment in machine labor finally starts to make sense for businesses. In motherboard assembly plants for example, human labor is preferred over some machines because you have less risk of downtime and workers are easily replaced. A few dozen workers calling in sick doesn't hurt anything. A multi-million dollar machine goes down, it could cost 10's of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Human labor in places like Taiwan is super cheap, and the cost of automated processes that companies would be dependent on aren't used as much as you'd imagine.

It's kind of the same thing here. At $5.45 an hour, cashiers are fine. At $15 an hour or more those self-checkout stations start to look pretty good.
 
c_porter said:
Automation increases the value of labor.

Source: The last 300 years
Click to expand...
Could have fooled me. Is that why my shoes are made by people in Vietnam for $2 a day now? Or why wages in the US are about the same as they were in the 70s, or even fallen for non-supervisory workers? Or why 95% of jobs created since the recession have been temp or contract work?
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: ncjoe
like this
c_porter said:
Automation increases the value of labor.

Source: The last 300 years
Click to expand...

Yeah...no. You're confusing the value of the labor of an individual worker with the collective value of labor as a whole. Overall, the importance of labor as capital is reduced by automation. Actually, that's the whole point.

Yes, machines are more efficient. Efficiency is good. The issue in this case is who benefits from said efficiency. It's unclear how the economy is going to function when the labor of 90% of the population has no economic value.
 
Last edited:
Dan_D said:
They work great for me. My only issue with them is that they don't work well for certain items. However, one cashier for a quad or so of self-checkout registers seems to work well for dealing with this.

Of course people are going to scream and rant about this but I think it was inevitable. People think cashiers should make enough money to support a family on instead of it being a type of transitory job you have early on in your life before getting into a real career. Minimum wage keeps getting bumped up and now it's reached a point where a huge investment in machine labor finally starts to make sense for businesses. In motherboard assembly plants for example, human labor is preferred over some machines because you have less risk of downtime and workers are easily replaced. A few dozen workers calling in sick doesn't hurt anything. A multi-million dollar machine goes down, it could cost 10's of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Human labor in places like Taiwan is super cheap, and the cost of automated processes that companies would be dependent on aren't used as much as you'd imagine.

It's kind of the same thing here. At $5.45 an hour, cashiers are fine. At $15 an hour or more those self-checkout stations start to look pretty good.
Click to expand...

Minimum wage is now quite low in real terms: https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html

The "problem" isn't that minimum wage is too high, it is that automation keeps getting cheaper.
 
tetris42 said:
Could have fooled me. Is that why my shoes are made by people in Vietnam for $2 a day now? Or why wages in the US are about the same as they were in the 70s, or even fallen for non-supervisory workers? Or why 95% of jobs created since the recession have been temp or contract contract work?
Click to expand...

Shoe manufacture is one of the least-automated industries in the world...so yes. The average Vietnamese shoe manufacturer uses hand tools and a sewing machine (the very best of 18th century technology!), and makes roughly what a low-skilled laborer in the US made in the early 1930s. Today's US automation-assisted manufacturer makes vastly more. Likewise, today's Vietnamese shoe manufacturer makes vastly less than today's Vietnamese manufacturer leveraging a billion dollars of Intel's automation capital.
 
bugleyman said:
Yeah...no. You're confusing the value of the labor of a given worker as opposed to the collective value of the labor pool. Overall, the importance of labor as capital is reduced by automation. That's the whole point.

Yes, machines are more efficient. The problem is who benefits from said efficiency.
Click to expand...

So nobody makes more than they did in 1780? Except for the guys with tophats that twirl their mustaches, of course.
 
c_porter said:
So nobody makes more than they did in 1780? Except for the guys with tophats that twirl their mustaches, of course.
Click to expand...

Don't be ridiculous, and stop trying to turn this into a political rant.

The point is that automation -- more specifically, AI -- is poised to render just about everyone "low-skilled" and irrelevant in a way that is completely unprecedented. Already, AI is better than most lawyers at doing research. Next will be doctors, coders, etc. Within decades labor will essentially cease to be an important form of capital. When that happens, society is going to require new economic models if it is to survive.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top