alt Hacker NewsSounds like they just put them in the wrong places.
> 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.”
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“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”
In the AI analogy, never underestimate the productivity of a human when dealing with a giant pile of groceries. You can throw all the AI and robots you can at something but sometimes a $20 an hour human picking from stacks of goods and produce simply destroys it in raw economics
But I think in the cities Kroger grocery stores serve as the fulfilment centers, so they don't need robotic ones.
There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation.