Apparently, the day is not far off when you’re going to order groceries online, and soon thereafter accept their delivery by a driverless car.
At a time when big-box retailers are trying to offer the same conveniences as their online competitors, the biggest U.S. grocery chain is testing the use of driverless cars to deliver groceries in a Phoenix suburb.
Kroger’s pilot program launched Thursday morning with a robotic vehicle parked outside one of its own Fry’s supermarkets in Scottsdale.
I wonder what sort of world all this automation is creating, but I’d probably use this service if it were available here. Why would I prefer to trudge around a grocery store for an hour, and then stand in a long line to check-out? It’s true that I won’t ever again bump into that couple whose kid was on John’s basketball team 15-years ago, but I can live with that.
I can easily imagine a day when the “grocery store” is just a warehouse that hardly anybody ever visits, except for those times when you forgot to put olives on your order. Then, you’ll order the olives at a terminal, pay, and then wait for a robot to pick your jar of olives and place it on a moving line that delivers it to the warehouse waiting room.
Imagine: Your local grocery store operating flawlessly and speedily, 24-hours a day, with just a half-dozen or so employees per shift; that’s coming. But what will be a teenager’s entry-level job when nobody shelves or operates a cash register any longer?