Can Robots Replace Cashiers
The effort to drive more automation in the retail industry has been on for more than a decade. There have been some successes so far, such…
The effort to drive more automation in the retail industry has been on for more than a decade. There have been some successes so far, such as, the automatic checkout counters we see now a days in grocery stores. More recently, such counters made headway into fast food joints, such as McDonalds. Then Amazon Go came by, and so did other competitors who wanted to eliminate the experience of waiting for a store clerk to process payments. It is predicted that 97% cashiers will loose jobs to some form of automation in the next 2 decades. Here is a summary of the recent state of art in retail automation.
However, a key inhibitor to this automation still exists. How will the Mom and Pop’s, small restaurants, and local joints, who cannot afford expensive technology used in Amazon Go? They still need to be competitive with The Amazon’s, else enter the slow death spiral. As an example, virtually every store had to adopt credit card processing because of the onslaught of the cashless society. Simi…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Learn With A Robot to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.