Ok, but robot pickers are expensive capital costs, and are set up to work in a warehouse environment with boxes, not a retail store full of soft goods and shelves. Unless you’re talking about recapitalizing the entire store to be a wearhouse, in which case there is a huge opportunity cost in regards to using good retail realestate for a warehouse.

Gonna have to use human pickers unless the grocery store is willing to completely recapitalize and the margins might not justify the high cost of retail real estate.

Nah, it would be more expensive since they would need to hire more pickers. also would probably loose customers who wouldn’t want someone else picking out their groceries.

To be clear, it doesn’t actually save them very much money. Like, it may seem like they’re reducing the number of employees, but, most of those employees spend most of their time doing other stuff like restocking shelves, all they’ve really done is reduced the number that hop on to registers when there is a rush.

Like… it’s actually more expensive for them in a lot of ways.

They don’t want the risk of actually having to design, build and market products to consumers. They want to sell a fungible commodity that someone else makes a product with, they get to make money regardless of the success or failure of any given product.

Ultimately, they’re not really interested in any of this because they think that it’s a useful technology. They’re only interested because the business model of building a bunch of data centers and selling the computer is simple and low risk. They wouldn’t be putting any money in to it if not for that business model.

Most of the leadership at these companies made their names in the cloud services and web hosting boom. They’re sticking to what they know and what has been the only really big success for the industry in the past decade.