The thing that's wrong with Ocado's technology is that it's ridiculously expensive and tailored for huge FC's (fulfillment centers). The problem with that is that it needs to serve a large population base to be effective and that's hard - in dense metros, the driving times are much longer despite smaller distances. In sparse metros, the distances are just too long. In our experience, the optimal FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K. Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.

There are a lot of logistical challenges outside the FC, especially last mile and you need to see the system as a whole, not just optimize one part to the detriment of all others.

> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.

> “Ultimately those were hard places to make this model work,” said Fenyo. “You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them. And so ultimately, these large centers were just not processing enough orders to pay for all that technology investment you had to make.”

Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”.

In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s).

At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items.

Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4.

I’d like to shop or even help build one of these.

> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.

They over-spent on automating low-volume FCs. You could draw comparisons to Amdahl's law, they optimised the bit that wasn't the issue, the real issue was delivery distances and times.

Ocado has had good success with the robotics approach in the UK, because the UK is very high density compared to a lot of the US. Plus Ocado put a lot of work into creating good delivery routes, whereas it sounds like that wasn't a component of the automation stack that Kroger bought.

Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.

That makes sense to me.

Feels like we’re going to have warehouse scale vending machines in cities, and delivery bots taking them from the warehouse-vending-machine to the customer.

We have done grocery pickup for years but the pickup lanes are almost always empty while dozens of shoppers walk into the store.

To me, shopping for groceries by hand is a waste of time but it clearly has some utility for a lot of people.

I wonder if that inertia is making traditional grocery shopping stickier than it should be and disincentivizing optimization.

I hope consumer tastes will change because there’s no reason for us to all walk into a giant warehouse every week.

Unlike Publix if I see a discount I know it is a discount. Every other item in Kroger has a yellow tag and a red price to make you think you are getting a deal when in fact the red number is higher than regular price at normal stores.

The title is a red herring.

Someone didn't read the 26 year old Webvan case study at CEO-school.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=26728

From wikipedia,

"The cycloid, with the cusps pointing upward, is the curve of fastest descent under uniform gravity (the brachistochrone curve). It is also the form of a curve for which the period of an object in simple harmonic motion (rolling up and down repetitively) along the curve does not depend on the object's starting position (the tautochrone curve)."

So swinging a rack along the cycloid is the fastest motion without having to contribute energy (apart from that to overcome friction etc.).

So you can have a large number of racks in the "left" position, choose to open a passage between racks 34 and 35 by having all racks >=35 swing to the right position. In this way all N racks can be accessed with only the loss of space of a single planar passage.

If everything which enters is weighed before insertion, the loading and unloading could happen near reversibly by arming or releasing appropriate counterweights.

Kinetic energy can also be stored gravitationally: accelerate (by dropping the weight) and decelerate (by lifting it again) for quick motions.

Better design for the ultimate cost center, energy consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloid

This I guess is Robo Kroger.

Guess I was right.

However, robotics that can navigate an existing retail grocery store is not here. yet.

I don't know what success looks like but it's probably fair to say they were over-extended by roughly 30-40%.

https://chainstoreage.com/kroger-pay-350-million-automation-...

Amazing that both opening and subsequently closing the facilities could provide a boost to profitability.

Sounds like there were some politics involved in the original decision.

I associate it more with delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats / DPD / UPS etc)

According to the article, there were several strategic blunders, including trying the model outside of cities where lack of density cut against it. Plus the apparent dismissal any value their 2700 retail locations could provide.

As far as I can tell, Kroger didn’t acknowledge anything except a change in strategy.

I'm also skeptical it'll ever work in America due to the general lack of density.

I don't see a way around this using mere technology. Either the service quality will have to be low, or the cost will have to be prohibitively high, or the people providing the service will have to be very poor.

We have solutions going back centuries that work. If you need more than an occasional concierge service you hire a chef as an employee. At some point it makes more sense to hire a part time chef than to pay enormous extra fees for giant shopping robots. Perhaps the economic decline from AI will make the idea of having house servants more acceptable to the very few people still having an income. Most strategies to replace high labor cost people with technology miss the point of long term permanent economic decline. We don't have a problem of too many financially successful people LOL if anything the problem is a severe lack of them.

Its kind of like cars. You have to unperson poor people who know how to drive if you want success with computer driven cars. This is the same concept but for hiring a servant to cook.

Also its very hard to scale royalty. If only the local equivalent of royalty can afford to pay to make the effort required to shop and cook and drive disappear, its going to be hard to dotcom scale that to billions of customers if there's only a couple multimillionaires who don't care about the price.

Trying to automate food shopping is like trying to go back to full service gas stations. Nobody wants it so its an uphill battle to sell.