Short answer: Jordan Metzner explains Amazon's Kiva robots bring shelves to a stationary picker, and imagines a Whole Foods where shelves move to the picker. He expects robots to make grocery fulfillment faster, cheaper and easier.
Watch this answer from Episode 20 (starts at 16:02) · Episode 20 notes and transcript
From Episode 20: Compliance, Pomelli, and the Rise of the Robots, starting at 16:02.
Sam Nadler [16:01]: Alright, Jordan. Let's transition to the news. We're gonna speak about your alma mater again, and this is a robot themed news download for episode 20. But Amazon is testing adding robot warehouses to Whole Foods so shoppers can pick up other orders at checkout. You obviously, worked at Amazon for many years. Top of mind, what do you think about this?
Jordan Metzner [16:30]: It's actually pretty interesting. So if you think about kind of how the Amazon fulfillment centers work or how they used to work before robots, you'd have people walking around with little pushcarts, and then you'd go to the shelf where you'd find the item and you'd pick it off the shelf. And then Amazon bought Kiva robots, and they started to build these shelves that would come to the picker. So the person would stay stable, but the shelf would move. Right? And now I believe, they have some robots that are picking instead of the human, but the idea that the picker, the person like picking the items never moves is really interesting. So now, like, let's apply this kind of to a supermarket. If you think of a Whole Foods, where you're ordering online, you essentially have a person who's a picker. They're walking around the store with a push cart, and they're picking up items off the shelf. And so you can imagine a different type of Whole Foods where the picker never moves and the shelves move for them.
Jordan Metzner [17:19]: And I think that, that's just one simple concept that Amazon can apply using its warehouse technology to build kind of the like an automated Whole Foods where, these pickers are able to basically pick orders real, very quickly in order to make a customer's kind of delivery order. So not exactly sure if that's the implementation that's being done here. But, Amazon obviously has been deep in robots. They've shown off, like, human picking robots inside their fulfillment centers. But it seems obvious that, these types of things are gonna be filled with robots very, very quickly to help you fulfill orders much quicker than you could do yourself. And I think probably going to the supermarket will be something that people will do if they choose, quote, want to do, but probably not have to do simply because, like, the robot will be faster, cheaper, and easier. But, yeah, curious what you think about all this.
