As part of a previous blog post the question was raised of when Robots would begin delivering groceries and turning those into meals. Well, it didn’t take long for the first robot deliveries part to happen.
First, an airborne drone has made the first known home-delivery in a remote American town in the state of Nevada. Now, the founders of Skype have built a prototype robot that delivers up to 2 bags of groceries in the UK.
The typical pattern for new technologies is that they start small, and then they improve in proportion to the amount of people paying to use the good or service. If and when this starts to scale, Wal-Mart and the other big grocery chains will have no choice to take notice of the little up-starts and try to adjust to compete. One can't help but wonder what that would mean for Wal-Mart's 2.2M total employees. Workforce adjustments could be necessary to keep as many of those 2.2M people working as possible. (I can't speak for everybody, but I personally don't fault CEOs for wanting to keep their own jobs too).
I don’t know an exact timeline of when trips to the grocery store will end. If the technology does prove out, I’d guess it’d take a decade or more for any transition to happen completely. Still, if I were depending on a grocery store for my livelihood, I’d be nervous enough to start looking for a new career now rather than waiting and betting against the many many startups fighting tooth and nail to be the first ones to get this right.
