Jumping Five Years Into The Future: Reviving Retail
A new cohort of automation is repurposing retail.
The cavernous warehouses of Amazon and Walmart filled with automation pioneered by companies like Ocado are now being remodeled by companies like Attabotics, a company making fulfillment systems that are a tiny fraction of the size of Amazon’s: they are small enough to fit inside the stock area of an average-sized retail store. The CEO of Attabotics says retailers no longer have a choice:
Automation is one thing you need to survive.
In How lockdown is changing shopping for good, Will Douglas Heaven notes the strange confluence of events where empty stores — obliterated by online commerce and the coronavirus — are being rapidly repurposed as fulfillment centers for retail chains who had closed their doors:
Instead of displaying items for passing customers, spaces are being turned into storerooms and delivery depots for businesses that have moved entirely online.
“It’s as if e-commerce jumped ahead five years,” says Vince Martinelli, head of product and marketing at RightHand Robotics, a US firm that has installed robotic arms for picking items from bins in around a dozen retail warehouses in the US, Europe, and Japan.
One response to the spike in…
