Instacart wants to replace its army of gig shoppers with robots

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Paying people to shop is expensive and unsustainable — delivery fees, price markups and tips can add 25% to a typical order

Despite working on the strategy for more than a year, however, the company has yet to sign up a single supermarket chain. Instacart had planned to begin testing the fulfillment centres later this year, the documents show. But the company has fallen behind schedule, according to people familiar with the situation.

But paying all those people to shop is expensive and unsustainable. Delivery fees, price markups and tips add as much as 25 per cent to what shoppers pay for a typical Instacart grocery order, said Marc Wulfraat, president of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International Inc., essentially making it a boutique service for the affluent.Automating the operation would cut those costs, let Instacart lower the fees and markups, potentially making the service more accessible to a mass market.

Under one proposal, Instacart would create a network of stand-alone fulfillment centres that would handle more than 3,500 orders a day with more than 100,000 units sold, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. More than 700 robots and about 160 people would do the work, with the machines fetching most of the items and workers gathering fresh and perishable food. The installation would cost US$20 million, with annual maintenance costs of US$380,000 a year.

Digital advertising has become an important revenue stream for traditional retailers like Walmart, Target Corp. and Kroger Co., which are keen to grab some of the web spending that Facebook Inc., Google and Amazon.com Inc. now largely gobble up. Losing those dollars to Instacart is another source of retailers’ frustration with the current relationship.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

 

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Instacart isn't really bad~ except, really, the cost. Not sure how a robot could shop fast & deliver in an acceptable way. They could use some more calculation to insure more reliability in stock. But losing the shoppers, likely, loses me...

There goes any quality in your purchases what so ever...at least with humans you might not get that overly ripe banana as with a robot that will just grab anything . Instacart

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