alt Hacker NewsThis is a failure of business model and logistics, not a failure of the robotics.
> 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.
I think we are mixing up two things here.
Robotics for picking and the general feasibility of grocery delivery in the US.
Ocado is good because their stock levels are far more accurate than the other supermarkets for online ordering, so you don't get as many substituted/missing items. This is sort of a side effect of having dedicated picking facilities Vs "real" supermarkets. I would not be surprised if they "lose" less stock as well compared to in supermarket fulfillment.
Then you have "is online grocery good in the US"? There's a lot of areas of the US that have reasonable density for this kind of service imo, and the road infrastructure is generally far superior to the UK which negates any loss of density (as you care about time between deliveries, not distance per se). I imagine the much better parking options in most suburbs in the US also helps efficiency (it's an absolute nightmare for a lot of the online delivery cos when there isn't off street parking in the UK and they have to park pretty far from the drop).
It sounds to me that Kroger just messed up the execution of this in terms of "marketing" more than anything.