Why Is Everyone Worried About the Grocery Store Robot?
The robot apocalypse has taken a surprisingly practical turn. We were promised The Terminator. We got a floor scrubber circling a yogurt spill. Somewhere between Hollywood and the Kroger loading dock, Skynet discovered that conquering humanity could wait until someone checked whether we were out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Grocery stores are bringing in robots to clean floors, scan shelves, and feed information into ordering systems. Tesco is testing inventory robots alongside cleaning technology. Kroger is evaluating competing shelf-scanning machines. The automation industry sees supermarkets becoming connected operations where cameras, software, and robots track what is happening throughout the store. RoboCop has been reassigned to loss prevention. [Association for Advancing Automation]
Honestly, some of this makes sense. Checking thousands of products is repetitive work. Floors need cleaning whether the overnight crew is fully staffed or held together by caffeine and one employee named Gary. A robot that handles the tedious stuff could give people more time to stock shelves and help customers. Although we should distinguish between a machine that discovers the ranch dressing is missing and someone who actually puts more ranch dressing out. Congratulations, WALL-E. You have identified the problem. Gary still has to find the pallet.
Then we arrive at the sentence that has apparently become America’s unofficial mission statement: “Nobody wants to work anymore.”
It is a wonderfully efficient explanation. No need to discuss wages, scheduling, workload, or whether the job requires open availability in exchange for a mysterious number of hours. Just declare an entire population lazy and proceed to the robot demonstration. But before accepting that explanation, I would like to see the offer. What does the job pay? Can someone depend on the hours? Will they know their schedule before they have to arrange childcare, or is next Tuesday being treated like the release date of a Marvel trailer?
There is evidence behind those questions. A study following 1,827 hourly retail and food-service workers found that unstable schedules strongly predicted turnover among workers with relatively unstable schedules. Job dissatisfaction and conflict between work and family helped explain the connection. That research covers more than grocery stores, but the point travels well: people’s willingness to stay depends partly on how the job fits into their lives. Your employee is a person with bills and obligations. They cannot spend the week in a charging dock until summoned. [The Shift Project, “Uncertain Time”]
Here is where the whole thing turns into Groundhog Day. A difficult job becomes hard to fill. The remaining workers pick up the slack. The job becomes less appealing. Management considers automation. If the savings then become an excuse to cut more hours, the people left behind get even less stability. Cue Sonny and Cher. We are back at “nobody wants to work,” except now there is a six-foot machine inspecting the Pop-Tarts. That is a possible cycle, not an accusation against every store adopting a robot. It is also exactly why the staffing explanation deserves scrutiny.
And there is an awkward flaw in the claim that these machines only handle work nobody wants: somebody is already doing it and would very much like to keep the paycheck. In July, UFCW 3000 challenged Fred Meyer’s planned introduction of Tally inventory robots. According to the union, the company described the machines as supplementing nonunion management. The union countered that its members already perform the work and warned about reduced hours and threats to benefit stability. Those are concerns about a disputed rollout, not confirmed mass layoffs. Still, “we’re freeing you up” sounds considerably less magical when nobody will explain what happens to your hours. [UFCW 3000]
Follow the produce back to the orchard, though, and the argument for robots gets harder to dismiss. Cornell is leading a four-year, $7.5 million project to develop machines for jobs including pollination, fruit thinning, apple harvesting, and weeding. Researchers point to ladder falls and repetitive-motion injuries as hazards of the work. One participating grower says labor has climbed from about 45% of its costs fifteen years ago to more than 60% today. That is one business’s experience, but it helps explain the interest. Picking fruit sounds charming until your body has to do it all day. The cottagecore montage tends to skip the orthopedic appointment. [Cornell Chronicle]
Before declaring the human hiring experiment a failure, companies should give better jobs a serious audition. Research on young service-sector workers found that pay and predictable schedules mattered, and that employers within the same industries offered substantially different working conditions. There is room to make different choices. A reliable schedule may lack the visual excitement of a robot gliding past the bakery, but it has the impressive feature of allowing someone to organize a life. [The Shift Project, Early Career Workers in the Service Sector]
Some jobs may remain hard to fill even after the pay and conditions improve. Automation can be a reasonable answer. But people turning down a bad deal and people fearing the loss of their livelihood can exist in the same economy, even in the same store. That is the uncomfortable conversation we need to have before handing every staffing problem to a machine with a friendly name.
Let the robot clean aisle seven. Just do not tell Gary that nobody wanted his job while he is standing there asking for more hours.