Thursday, March 22, 2018

$15 min wage = robots!

This is what $15/hr minimum wage gets you. Walmart is rolling out shelf-reading hardware in California.

The company [Walmart] is launching a small army of autonomous scanning robots.

The robots are 6 feet tall, equipped with an array of lights, cameras, and radar sensors.

It then goes up and down each aisle on its own, at 2 to 3 mph, scanning the shelves for empty spots, and also checking the price tags.

And because its California, they spent a good part of the video on this:

Shopper Deborah Espinoza was at the Walmart store in Milpitas and spoke with an employee about the robot.

"Wow, so it's like taking somebody's job?" Espinoza asked.

A Walmart employee said, "It's not taking someone's job. It's designed to improve the job."

"Oh really?" Espinoza responded.

Espinoza is skeptical. She works at San Jose International Airport and says when automated checkout was introduced there, cashiers were laid off.

Walmart says they are freeing up their associates to provide better customer service. We asked Espinoza if she buys that.

"Uh, no. No," Espinoza said.

Walmart says it is still too early to say how the robots will impact their workforce.

Yes, obviously the store will be laying off shelf reader people. At $15 an hour, PLUS BENEFITS mind you, a multi-billion dollar robotics solution is fantastically cheaper than minimum wage workers. Added benefit, the robots won't steal stuff. Shrinkage at a Walmart from employee theft is ~25%. That's a lot of fricking money over a whole store chain, bro.

But everybody knew this would happen. It is obvious, painfully so. Companies will either fire staff, or go under. So why do people like Deborah Espinoza seem so surprised and stuff when Walmart and the airport lay off workers? Because they are MORONS who believe in magic, that's why. Keep voting DemocRat, everything will be okay. They'll magic it all better.

Better than those Republican fascists, right? They'd have kept the minimum wage low, and Walmart would have skipped the robots. Too iffy, too expensive. Then all these dumb shits would have jobs to complain about... oh, wait.

However, one day soon the fully automated Walmart stores will not have any customers. Because their primary customer base is magic-believing morons who work minimum wage jobs, and they will all be fricking well fired and replaced by robots.

Robots don't steal, but they don't SHOP either.

But hey, keep voting DemocRat/Liberal and it will be okay, my friends. Because magic. And hope! Yeah, that's the ticket. Hope, and change. Say, that's catchy. Somebody should use that.

1 comment:

Reziac said...

In California, wages are only about 30% of the cost of each employee. So the savings aren't $15/hour; it's more like $50/hour.