Michael Corkery* says as automation comes to retail industries, machines are being given more humanlike features to make them liked, not feared.
When Tina Sorg first saw the robot rolling through her Giant supermarket in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she said to herself, “That thing is a little weird.”
Programmed to detect spills and debris in the aisles, the robot looked like an inkjet printer with a long neck.
“It needed personality,” said Ms Sorg, 55, who manages the store’s beer and wine department.
So, during one overnight shift, she went out to a nearby arts and craft store, brought back a large pair of googly eyes and, when no one was looking, affixed them on the top of the robot.
The eyes were a hit with executives at the global grocery company Ahold Delhaize, which owns the Giant and Stop & Shop supermarket chains.
They are now a standard feature on the company’s nearly 500 robots across the US.
How this supermarket robot got its goofy eyes touches on a serious question: Will robots with friendly faces and cute names help people feel good about devices that are taking over an increasing amount of human work?
Robots are now working everywhere from factories to living rooms.
But the introduction of robots to public settings like the supermarket is fuelling new fears that humans are being pushed out of jobs.
Consulting firm McKinsey says supermarkets could immediately reduce “the pool of labour hours” by as much as 65 per cent if they adopted all the automation technology currently available.
“Margin pressure has made automation a requirement, not a choice,” McKinsey said in a report last year.
Retailers said their robot designs were not explicitly meant to assuage angst about job losses.
Still, companies of all sizes across the world are investing in tens of thousands of friendly looking robots that are quickly upending human work.
Most of the retail robots have just enough human qualities to make them appear benign, but not too many to suggest they are replacing humans entirely.
“It’s like Mary Poppins,” said Peter Hancock, a Professor at the University of Central Florida, who has studied the history of automation.
“A spoonful of sugar makes the robots go down.”
Perhaps no other retailer is dealing as intensely with the sensitivities around automation as Walmart, the largest private employer in the US, with about 1.5 million workers.
The company spent many months working with the firm Bossa Nova and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to design a shelf-scanning robot that they hope both employees and customers will feel comfortable with.
This robot was designed without a face, because its developers did not want customers to think they could interact with the device.
But many of the robots have names, given to them by store staff.
Some also wear name badges.
“We want the associates to have an attachment to it and want to protect it,” said Sarjoun Skaff, a co-founder and the chief technology officer at Bossa Nova.
Walmart said it planned to deploy the robots in 1,000 stores by the end of the year — up from about 350.
At the Walmart Supercenter in Phillipsburg New Jersey, employees named the robot Wall-E — a choice partly inspired by the Pixar film that depicts a trash-collecting robot on a deserted planet.
The robot can work 365 days a year, scanning shelves with high-resolution cameras tabulating out-of-stock items.
It takes a short break between shifts to recharge its batteries in a docking station.
Wall-E completes its route with no assistance from humans, except when it becomes stuck on the rug in the pharmacy section.
When this happens, the store manager, Tom McGowan, gets an alert on his phone, sometimes in the middle of the night.
He then calls the store to tell someone to free the robot.
Tally, a robot that cruises the aisles of Giant Eagle grocery stores in Pennsylvania and Ohio, has digital cartoonlike eyes that blink but perform no actual function.
A blue computer screen flashes messages informing customers what the robot is doing: “Stock check!”
Jeff Gee, a co-founder of Simbe Robotics, the firm that developed Tally, said the eyes were meant to help customers feel comfortable with the device, particularly in areas of the country “where a lot of people have never experienced robots in the wild before”.
Retailers say robots are good for their workers.
They free up employees from mundane and sometimes injury-prone jobs like unloading delivery trucks to focus on more fulfilling tasks like helping customers.
At the Walmart Supercenter in Phillipsburg, a newly installed unloader automatically sorts boxes arriving at the store and reduced the number of workers needed to empty a delivery truck from eight to four.
The task now takes employees about two-thirds the time it used to, springing them from the often-sweltering confines of the back room to spend time ferrying inventory out to the aisles and dealing with customers.
Walmart says the new unloader has reduced turnover in the back room.
Automation has not yet reduced Walmart’s overall work force, but executives acknowledge that the number of positions in the stores will eventually decline through attrition.
“There is never going to be this great cataclysm of job loss,” Professor Hancock said.
“It is going to be death by a thousand cuts, or death by a thousand robots.”
Throughout history, he said, workers have attacked technologies when they feel threatened.
“If you push too hard, too far, people transfer their anger to the technology and they revolt,” he said.
Ms Sorg, who has worked at Giant for 14 years, isn’t worried.
At first, she was unsure how her bosses would react to the googly eyes.
But the robot’s developers at Badger Technologies loved them.
One of the supermarket’s executives remarked that the robot reminded him of an employee named Marty, who was “tall, thin, reserved and not very emotional”.
Since then, the robot has been known as Marty.
* Michael Corkery is a reporter at The New York Times. He tweets at @mcorkery5.
This article first appeared at www.nytimes.com.
