Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far

https://www.grocerydive.com/news/kroger-ocado-close-automated-fulfillment-centers-robotics-grocery-ecommerce/805931/

by JumpCrisscross • 8 months ago

276 330 8 months ago

Notable that the reasons for failure to meet benchmarks was that the locations were too far away, and that they are moving to the “Micro-Fulfillment Center” approach that Amazon is doing at Whole Foods. This is exactly what everyone predicted when Amazon bought WF - turn it into a grocery FC.

That makes sense to me.

Feels like we’re going to have warehouse scale vending machines in cities, and delivery bots taking them from the warehouse-vending-machine to the customer.

recursive2• 8 months ago

I like being able to see the thing I'm going to get and holding it in my hand.

aerostable_slug4• 8 months ago

I like not going to the store more.

Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections. It might be difficult to transition that particular incentive to robots, but the point is that delivery items don't have to suck.

The only thing I really still pick out by hand every time are beef briskets. Pork shoulders tend to be uniform enough that randomly picking a cryovac works out, but there's a good bit of variation in brisket that makes a difference with the final product, at least when the brisket is prepared with a smoker. YMMV

AlotOfReading• 8 months ago

The grocery industry relentlessly optimizes for implicit choices over expressed preferences. Nobody is asking for misters, colored lighting, skeumorphic veggie bins, and wide open sightlines in the produce aisle. Stores do it because customers buy more when they do. The same thing will happen to in-store shopping if consumer preferences swing ever swing that way instead.

acessoproibido• 8 months ago

I'll believe it when i see it

cgriswald• 8 months ago

This isn’t what Amazon has done at least here on the Peninsula. My WF orders come from Brisbane just like my overnight shipping and Amazon Fresh orders do. Before that they were coming from San Jose, possibly from a WF there but there are closer WF stores in both directions and none in Brisbane.

mosura• 8 months ago

Sounds 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.”

jlarocco• 8 months ago

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.

michaelt2• 8 months ago

It depends on your business model.

If a basket of groceries brought online costs $15 more than the in-store prices, then you can pick in-store profitably, very easy. That's the instacart model.

But if a basket of groceries brought online costs about the same as buying in-store? With the retailer bearing the costs of picking, packing and delivery instead of the customer?

Well then you need something more efficient than a store.

sct202• 8 months ago

Kroger placed one of the sites in Orlando to also service Tampa and Jacksonville when they have 0 regular stores in the entire state. They were trying to use it to expand into the area, but I never saw very much in terms of advertising or promotions to drive demand but it could have also been that the robots were so bad that they couldn't attempt to market and push volume.

Animats2• 8 months ago

Using a retail store for fulfillment means orders are accepted for items that are out of stock. the ordering system doesn't have reliable inventory info. Then the customer gets a partial shipment. This is the curse of Safeway grocery ordering.

monero-xmr• 8 months ago

“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

bowmessage• 8 months ago

That’s not really what the article implies, at all.

tverbeure• 8 months ago

They literally went too far…

georgefrowny5• 8 months ago

I idly wonder if what would actually make sense here is a hybrid model that combines a gigantic fulfillment center with tens of thousands of products located "far" from people, with a large physical footprint and near to road/rail arteries, but with a mid-bandwidth, high-granularity, low-latency physical link to "near" places.

For example, imagine you had an upscaled pneumatic tube system (don't get hung up on the exact implementation, it could be a small gauge train system or conveyer belt: whatever floats your Factorio-addled boat) with a diameter around, say, half a metre to a metre, packed goods into canisters and shot into town where they pop out at local distribution centres for pickup or last-mile delivery.

This is where I thought the Boring Company might be going back before it was obvious it was an anti-public transit gambit.

Possibly the curse of rail systems applies where the maintenance of the track (tube) costs so much that it's cheaper to fly (done delivery) or drive all the way on public roads (current solution). The advantage over rail is that the land footprint is very small: the tract is about a metre wide and can be buried if needed. Perhaps it's just not really different enough to trucking it all into town using semi trailers, which would still be required for large items and especially construction materials.

Then again, even if this hare-brained system were to work, this assumes we actually want to continue to reduce most human commercial interactions to gigantic, remote, anonymous capital-intensive megasystems producing pods that pop out of the ground into robotic vending stations.

pjc50• 8 months ago

Buried anything is just horrendously expensive. Partly because of other things that are already buried.

MattExact• 8 months ago

This is pretty much exactly what Ocado already do, at least in the UK.

They have 4 CFCs and 15-20 "spokes".

rcxdude2• 8 months ago

Yeah, because arguably the main advantage of Ocado's warehouse is that it's extremely dense: you can pack a lot of storage in a very small area and still access it reasonably efficiently. But this only matters if space is at a premium, like near towns and cities (and for low-margin deliveries, you want your drivers to not have to go very far to your customers).

liquidise• 8 months ago

Good news for blue collar workers, tough for investors. The bean-counting dream of LLM's and Robotics remains, but until ChatGPT is placing your order at Mcdonalds drive-thrus and Amazon is laying off warehouse associates en masse, i'd say that last 5% is still taking 95% of the time.

markbao3• 8 months ago

McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.

glitchc• 8 months ago

Sure, but not the kitchen staff, which is where the robotics dream is supposed to take you.

kulahan• 8 months ago

I hate those stupid things so much. They're really, as far as I can tell, just moving all labor to the kitchen and drive-thru, while considering the dining area an afterthought.

Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.

al_borland2• 8 months ago

McDonald’s is also pushing their app pretty hard with lots of incentives.

gedy• 8 months ago

I don't know what they are thinking, the kiosks are not cheap to install or maintain, they are buggy, and they've put me off from going into McDs anymore. The In-N-Out nearby is cheaper, friendlier with plenty of employees working, (and better quality), so not sure what McD's end game is here.

bcrosby952• 8 months ago

I love it when people invent things to force everyone perform self service and call it 'progress'.

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.

gilbetron• 8 months ago

Taco Bell by us has AI order taking and it is amazing. Quick, always has been getting it correct, and easy to understand. Granted, it's probably very abusable, but for someone just wanting to put in a quick order it is way better than a person.

0xffff22• 8 months ago

I've had very bad luck with Taco Bell's AI. It is not good at all with modifications in my experience. I actually order on the app now just to minimize my interaction with the chatbot. It is very good at processing "mobile order for <my name>" at least.

bombcar• 8 months ago

I remember a glowing video about this thing (by Tom Scott maybe?) and being confused how it could ever compete with humans being paid slave wages.

Guess I was right.

petesergeant2• 8 months ago

You were not, this works just fine in the UK

slashyellow• 8 months ago

I mean, it's a fiercely competitive market and they've managed to stake out a position, which is great and all, but to be blunt they have a market share of ~2.1%, and they've consistently unprofitable. And they've been at this for like 20 years.

Honestly the main problem seems to be most people just don't like buying certain items online, and that doesn't seem to be changing quickly. If Covid didn't break people out of that, I can't think of anything that will.

And FWIW, I think for an online only supermarket you'd expect their website to be pretty amazing, but their competitors are just as good.

gurumeditations• 8 months ago

Having FCs an hour away from your customers, packing groceries into a tiny truck with one or two employees per truck, the trucks alone would never pay for themselves let alone the FCs. This was obvious from the get go and it’s why Walmart has been the only one successfully doing grocery pickup and delivery for 6 years. Every store is an FC and they’re all within 20 minutes of their customers.

sethhochberg• 8 months ago

There are examples of the warehouse-based model working, but they clearly require both density _and_ mindshare. Its not clear Kroger had either based on the other comments in here. FreshDirect in NYC has been operating since the early 2000s with a fleet of tiny trucks with a couple of employees in them and a giant FC with essentially zero retail footprint.

(As an aside, they also have some of the best meat and produce you can get in the city without going to a farmers market. So many retail grocery stores here lack loading docks, the food handling getting from the truck to the sidewalk to the basement of the store to the shelves is really, really rough especially during the summer months. Skipping that and going warehouse-to-home has advantages)

Havoc• 8 months ago

TIL Ocado is supposed to be an automation/robotics co.

I associate it more with delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats / DPD / UPS etc)

nextworddev• 8 months ago

it's just a wheeled bot that's driven by a joystick by some offshore person /s

rcxdude2• 8 months ago

They see themselves as a tech company, but fundamentally they've only really cracked their own grocery business, I think.

SideburnsOfDoom• 7 months ago

Ocado has delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats etc)

True. the difference is that Uber eats takes an order and immediately aims to deliver it as soon as possible.

Ocado takes a grocery order, stores it and aims to deliver it e.g. "next Wednesday, between 6pm and 7pm", and you can modify the order until midnight on Tuesday.

Given that UK Urban traffic levels are unpredictable, the vans will occasionally be in position before the start time. There also is some time where the guy is in the back of the van finding the current order.

But you're right, as the public interacts with them, Ocado's role is "Deliver groceries in a van" not "automation/robotics". The latter is an implementation detail to us.

Also, several people's groceries in 1 van is more fuel efficient and less traffic congestion than all of those people each driving to a big store and back. So it's a win.

da02• 8 months ago

Here in the Houston areas, supermarkets like Kroger/Walmart/HEB/etc always have single floor buildings. Why can't they build multi-floor buildings for storage upstairs and retail walk-in sales on the ground floor? On the above ground floors, they can create an automated or semi-automated system for employees to gather up items for online/delivery orders.

tacker2000• 8 months ago

I would guess that having everything on one floor optimizes the unloading, restocking and logistics. Also construction is cheaper.

poguemahoney• 8 months ago

Good construction is not cheap and takes many quarters. Land outside the urban area is far too cheap and probably subsidized (directly or with free oversized infrastructure) because local government always wants jobs, even small numbers of shitty jobs.

AngryData2• 8 months ago

Probably because you then need pillars throughout the entire building to support the second floor which you are loading down with a ton of weight. The average forklift weighs 3x or more the weight of the average car, and then adding racking and stock on top of that. Yeah if you completely redesign your storage system to not require forklifts you save weight there, but you end up adding the weight back with all the heavy duty track systems and extra heavy duty racks that are required to eliminate the forklifts. Plus there is liability of having that weight up top, a rack failure on a second floor could take down half the building.

It is possible, but you end up spending 10x as much on the building.

alphabettsy• 8 months ago

Then put the warehouse on the first floor and put the store on top.

Lots of big cities have grocery stores with parking garages under them, doesn’t seem much different.

tstrimple4• 8 months ago

I think this is correct. A lot of these buildings seem to be post frame or poll barn style. Relatively cheap for building large square footage buildings but add some limitations to multiple floors. Even if you put the storage floor under the shopping floor you'll run into tons of issues with buildings of these sizes that don't have a ton of pillars for additional support. I mostly see these stores built on vacant "rural" land on the outskirts of cities rather than in city centers themselves. Which means the single floor square footage is rarely an issue and not something worth designing a building around. If you have all the space you need to go wide, it's almost never worth going tall.

bena5• 8 months ago

The vast majority of the inventory is already on the sales floor.

Also, the backstock is minimal. Stores are designed for turnaround.

DrewADesign• 8 months ago

Right. Not selling things fast enough is a bigger problem than not having enough storage for unsold stock.

taeric3• 8 months ago

Glad someone made this point. I'm curious how long people think most items in a grocery store last? Just consider the trucks you see stocking them on a daily basis. Typically it is bread and other high flow consumables, no?

mlrtime3• 8 months ago

I thought about this a lot with parking spaces, nobody like big, open, tree-less parking lots. Why not just build them up adjacent to the grocery store.

The answer is $. It costs too much and land is cheaper than building up (In most places).

adolph• 8 months ago

All recent HEBs have dedicated grocery pickup staging space. I chatted with a staffer once. It is like its own little grocery store where they keep selections of hot, cold and room temperature bags of selected groceries temperature controlled until the orderer comes and they put them together and bring them out.

The ones in Bellaire and Meyerland are two level with parking (aka flooding space) below the store and a smaller parking lot on the second level with the store. Bellaire also has a fancy fuel cell setup for some reason. The single level HEB in Montrose(ish) was built into the site of an old complex of charming but nearly abandoned standalone quad/duplexes with many mature oaks. They seem to have retained nearly all of the trees on the grounds in greenspaces within the parking lot and entryway.

Here's some street view of Montrose. They also had a bike air and repair system when it opened. I'm not certain if it stayed in good repair itself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KxHAvDqKca4E8L8a7

omgJustTest• 8 months ago

3 CFCs (robotics centers) closed, 5 continuing operating [1]. Initial commitment was 20 & Kroger is paying 350m$ to compensate the partner.

I don't know what success looks like but it's probably fair to say they were over-extended by roughly 30-40%.

https://chainstoreage.com/kroger-pay-350-million-automation-...

websiteapi• 8 months ago

this kind of stuff is still probably a few orders of magnitude too expensive per unit cost.

I'm also skeptical it'll ever work in America due to the general lack of density.

trebligdivad2• 8 months ago

I sometime use Ocado in the UK, and it's 'OK' but it's certainly not at the cheap end of the market. I more often use a traditional supermarkets home delivery service where it's manually picked; those supermarkets have the advantage of having very little infrastructure overhead in the picking - they mostly use their existing stores and pick at quiet times/over night. Ocado has to run entire warehouses just for this task. Ocado can only work with packed goods - not weighed vegetables for example - which the hand pickers in store can do, albeit whether they do it well is down to luck and the mood of the picker.

calcifer• 8 months ago

Ocado can only work with packed goods - not weighed vegetables for example

Not quite. Packed yes, but for many vegetables they have both item count and weight-based packages, e.g. "4 potatoes" vs "1kg potatoes".

I think that strikes the right balance.

trebligdivad2• 8 months ago

Interesting, however in my case we have someone who eats a banana each day with breakfast. There's no way to buy 7 bananas in your weekly shop!

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

I had a wonderful retro futuristic dream about an automated Costco warehouse a few weeks ago. It was one of the less weird dreams so I still remember it clearly.

Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”.

In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s).

At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items.

Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4.

I’d like to shop or even help build one of these.

cmckn• 8 months ago

Sounds like a lot of waiting around, versus just browsing the aisles. Maybe today’s consumers need to rediscover cash-and-carry, though.

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

In the dream customers just walk around and make orders. It’s actually old style I think, but with robots. Yeah it’s a bit like cash and carry, but customers didn’t move into the sections. They just get to browse the samples robots carried to them.

TBH, now that I think about it, the dream was way more vague than what I described in the reply. My brain probably reasoned about the idea subconsciously.

whynotmaybe• 8 months ago

Something like this?

https://www.untappedcities.com/automats-cafeterias-nyc/

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

Yeah, something like this.

The only exception in warehouse was the cafeteria. I guess my brain wanted to make something retro futuristic so it made the cafeteria “retro” — manned by humans and cooked by humans too. There were even balloons inside now that I recall…

seanmcdirmid2• 8 months ago

Sounds like the old general store model, you didn’t browse yourself, the shop keep would bring out what you wanted, it was always behind the counter. I experienced this in China when I started visiting in 1999/early 2000s, it’s mostly not like that anymore though. You still have department stores where you need to buy things first before touching them, though.

Scoundreller• 8 months ago

Had a large-format (for its time) chain store in Canada like that until 1996: https://www.tvo.org/article/what-happened-to-consumers-distr...

Basically a catalogue store without shipping to your door.

noisy_boy• 8 months ago

Most of small town India is this. Small store, one person, usually owner or their family member, doing everything.

onraglanroad• 8 months ago

Indeed. Always handy if you needed four candles.

ch4s3• 8 months ago

You'll obviously buy fewer things that way, and I can't see that making business sense.

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

Yeah, that could be true. I'm not sure how many people are similar to me, who are allergic to "window shopping" and just want to buy, pay and exit. My Costco session is less than 30 minutes (from parking to back to car) in average.

I do research price, though, so if they show a big DISCOUNT sign and is more or less honest with it, I'll probably grab some, too.

CPLX• 8 months ago

You’ve just described B&H in New York City.

aerostable_slug4• 8 months ago

Now I'm picturing Hasidic robots.

vkou• 8 months ago

You've reinvented the Soviet grocery store, but with robots instead of people and with a $7 cup of coffee.

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

I remember those stores as I came from a similar background. One vital difference is that they all have workers who have a straight face and don’t give it a fuck about customer service.

Then in the 90s they were all washed away by the new ones.

Animats2• 8 months ago

What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.

[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...

system2• 8 months ago

Incredible, they were 75 years ahead of their time.

markus_zhang8• 8 months ago

Wow, this man was decades ahead of his time. My hat off.

hypercube33• 8 months ago

Thank you for that rabbit hole. Interesting that the same guy gave us both of the present day shopping systems just one was too far ahead

mapt2• 8 months ago

And what some of us might not have the context for, is that grocery stores at the time were usually clerk-serviced; Just like you don't pump your own gas in New Jersey, at the time the norm was that you handed the clerk a list of products and they fetched them from the shelves for you.

Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.

dredmorbius2• 8 months ago

There were also automats, automated restaurants serving all food through a vending machine (or more accurately, wall). Classically all for a single fixed price (a nickle).

These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).

Mink: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y3GXMB4VPY8>

Concerto: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NT6bxlnS1Is>

pirate787• 8 months ago

That was Best store in the 1980s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Products

klooney• 8 months ago

In my home town, they tore the Best down and replaced it with a Best Buy, which was very confusing.

tdeck2• 8 months ago

If you wish to experience more futuristic fever dreams, I present the Dahir Insaat YouTube channel:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc_6wfDYuFU

rimbo7892• 8 months ago

That sounds truly terrible.

Frye2• 8 months ago

Also worth mentioning Kroger just lost a multi million dollar lawsuit in Florida after one of their delivery trucks hit a cyclist. I wonder if this has anything to do with it as well.

rolandog2• 8 months ago

"Something, something, ... omelettes ... few eggs" -- mouthpiece from corporation that lobbies to cut regulations

Dylan168073• 8 months ago

I can't find the story, but if it's a human-driven truck there's nothing special about a vehicle hitting someone. Everyone that drives a vehicle is accepting that risk. It's not heartless to have vehicles. And I don't even know what particular regulations you're trying to imply.

danpalmer• 8 months ago

This 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.

martinald• 8 months ago

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.

themafia• 8 months ago

failure of business model and logistics

Just the model. They optimized for tax outcomes. They obviously wanted in on the "Amazon race to the bottom" game.

https://www.leesburg-news.com/2025/11/30/kroger-took-incenti...

the real issue was delivery distances and times.

Which they could care less about. Where else are you going to go?

mrweasel2• 8 months ago

It's even explained in the article:

You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them

It's clearly not a technology problem, but it was made worse by heavily investing in robotics for locations that already couldn't sustain a fulfillment center.

brookst2• 8 months ago

Weird headline, totally unsupported by the article.

According to the article, there were several strategic blunders, including trying the model outside of cities where lack of density cut against it. Plus the apparent dismissal any value their 2700 retail locations could provide.

As far as I can tell, Kroger didn’t acknowledge anything except a change in strategy.

irjustin• 8 months ago

Doesn't that support the article? their bet was massive robotics in centralized warehouses, but that turns out not to be profitable.

Unsure how the headlines doesn't align. Maybe it's different than what I'm seeing:

Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far

brookst2• 7 months ago

Point me to where in the article Kroger, as a corporate statement, “acknowledged” that it “went too far”? I just re-read and it’s not there.

A proper headline would be something like “facing disappointing results, Kroger shifts robotics strategy”. It’s a subtle but important difference. Main thing being that good writing does not put words in its subjects’ mouths. Unless Kroger actually acknowledged it, you don’t say they did.

adxl• 8 months ago

Whenn I lived in Atlanta the Krogers each had a nickname. There was disco Kroger because of its disco ball. There was murder Kroger that purportedly had been the site of a murder.

This I guess is Robo Kroger.

softwaredoug• 8 months ago

In Charlottesville all the Krogers are quite different.

A weird, dark, maze-like warehouse-feeling Kroger that just closed.

We have a really nice Kroger a bit outside town. I always think of it as the Gucci Kroger.

A college-kid, cheaper Kroger close to the center of town. The cheaper version of the Harris Teeter nearby.

There's as much variation in individual Krogers as between other grocery chains!

bediger4000• 8 months ago

A common practice in Denver. Kroger's local brand is "King Soopers". There's Scary Soopers, Queen Soopers, and ironically El Safeway and Soviet Safeway.

pinkmuffinere• 8 months ago

I like to imagine that whenn is like iff -- ie, when would mean "when and only when", lol

rsynnott7• 8 months ago

There was disco Kroger because of its disco ball.

... As in the supermarket had a disco ball? Was it spinning?

nacozarina• 8 months ago

all it takes is one junior executive gets caught by one chinese robot saleswoman, and the next thing you know…

analog31• 8 months ago

It looks like they got the robots together but forgot the groceries.

fma• 8 months ago

Or their online groceries didnt succeed because people can p4ice shop. I am of the belief Kroger does well because they obfuscate their prices and their tags which make it seems like they are sales truely are not.

Unlike Publix if I see a discount I know it is a discount. Every other item in Kroger has a yellow tag and a red price to make you think you are getting a deal when in fact the red number is higher than regular price at normal stores.

petesergeant2• 8 months ago

Or their online groceries didnt succeed because people can p4ice shop.

Ocado does just fine though, and are rarely the cheapest choice.

itopaloglu83• 8 months ago

It’s a great convenience though, we’ve been using it over a year now and it solved most of the bulk purchases, we then visit the store for other detailed items and get done quickly.

georgefrowny5• 8 months ago

One of the reasons I kind of gave up on deliveries after COVID was the the experience of having a friendly but slightly rushed bloke clearly politely itching to get on to the next stop turn up at some random time in the evening (it's booked to a slot but the variance was large). Then he holds your door open and either helps you unload it watches you unload a bunch of randomly packed loose items from a large handful of his plastic crates, some with a single item in them, as fast as possible into laundry baskets in the hallway so you can transfer it to the right place at leisure. That was actually somehow really annoying to me.

Tesco used to use plastic box liners which you doing just hoick out, but those were quickly stopped due to bring plastic.

I'd rather they just handed over the crates or something and I could return them for a deposit the next time. Obviously I'd also rather all the supermarkets could share the same crates so I don't have to babysit piles of each brand separately.

Maybe Ocado have a better system then Tesco here?

joncrocks• 8 months ago

Ocado (at least in the UK) pack items into plastic bags inside the crates, which makes unloading easier at the doorstep.

You are charged for the bags (in the UK you have to charge 5p for plastic bags) but are refunded when you return them (during a later delivery).

0xffff22• 8 months ago

What are "normal stores"? For me, Ralphs (Kroger), Stater Bros and Whole Foods are the main available (what I think of as) "normal" grocery stores, and of the three anything on sale at Ralphs is sure to be the cheapest of the three.

imroot• 8 months ago

I've always said that in the back of my mind, the most successful grocery store would be the 'walls' of the store -- bakery, deli, produce, meats, floral, cheeses, dairy and having a little selection of store brands in the middle where consumers can pick up (and vendors can pay a premium for endcap space, because they're the only non-branded products out there), with the rest of the SKU's behind the walls of the grocery store in a fulfillment only model.

Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.

zrobotics• 8 months ago

So what grocery stores used to be ~90 years ago, when the norm was you would give the clerk a list and they would grab your items from the back? The only stores I'm still aware of that are setup like this are auto parts stores, where 90% of the inventory is in the back.

ZeWaka• 8 months ago

Only other places I can think of is weed dispensaries and pharmacies.

You could also count shoe stores and high-end jewelry and watch stores in that the clerk has to go in the back to fetch the non-display model.

NegativeLatency4• 8 months ago

A store with a good deli/butcher is still like this to some degree

Doxin• 8 months ago

Toolstation still has a model like that, and I gotta say I love it. They also seem to hire people who actually know something about the products they sell which is an unfortunate rarity these days.

zuppy• 8 months ago

that is a guarantee for less sales, not sure it makes business sense. for example, i don't buy generic products, i want specific properties from them. and sometimes i don't know what i want, i look at the isle and only then decide. and let's not forget about impulse shopping.

honestly, i wouldn't shop at this store, i want to get the items myself, without any interaction. interactions add delays.

tdeck2• 8 months ago

This reminds me of the retail chain Service Merchandise which apparently used to operate this way. You'd walk around the store looking at display products, pick things out on a sheet, and then they'd appear on a conveyor belt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise

I have never been to one because they went out of business decades ago.

jcims• 8 months ago

This gave me a flashback to Service Merchandise. No idea how widespread they were, but that's how it operated. You'd collect tags for the things you want, take them to the counter, wait a bit and your order would roll out on a belt. Pull your car up, load it and leave.

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

I work in this exact space (online grocery retailer in Europe). We're profitable and one of the few companies to be so in the sector - many online divisions are losing money and being bankrolled by the parent company with physical stores. Alternatively, burning VC money.

The thing that's wrong with Ocado's technology is that it's ridiculously expensive and tailored for huge FC's (fulfillment centers). The problem with that is that it needs to serve a large population base to be effective and that's hard - in dense metros, the driving times are much longer despite smaller distances. In sparse metros, the distances are just too long. In our experience, the optimal FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K. Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.

There are a lot of logistical challenges outside the FC, especially last mile and you need to see the system as a whole, not just optimize one part to the detriment of all others.

algo_trader• 8 months ago

FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K.

deja-vu from the e-scooter business. even with a good product, its just not profitable/scalable enough

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

Ours is profitable enough. And it can scale but covering more area with FC's of a profitable size. Additionally, market penetration of online grocery shopping is growing rapidly and has no reasons (that we see) to stop growing (as a % of all grocery shopping).

bob1029• 8 months ago

The grocery business has razor thin margins. There is no dry sponge remaining to absorb this kind of massive fixed cost. The business is highly variable.

I think scaling up would be the only way out of this problem. Scaling down only makes it worse.

criddell• 8 months ago

Or you sell every bit of data you collect.

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

No true for us at least. Well kind of - the scale I'm mentioning is required if you're doing your own tech like we do. We develop all our core tech - the website, the logistics operation automation, the last mile app and scheduling. If we can do that profitably, what do you think will happen a company like our develops a few FC's of similar scale using the same technology?

The margins are thin, but not as razor thin as you might think. The grocery stores have a lot of overhead that we don't. Additionally, people realize that not only is that the case, but they also save from their own costs - just driving to the store is not free, let alone the time you spend, which is massively cut down.

NicoJuicy4• 8 months ago

They literally copied their supplier ( autostore ).

Unfortunately, auto.ol shared secrets with them, Ocado abused that in court.

Literally, Fuck Ocado. I wouldn't trust them.

bitdivision• 8 months ago

Some context: https://archive.ph/Apfdv

Autostore ended up paying Ocado? How did Ocado abuse them?

simgt5• 8 months ago

Where are you operating? I live in a dense European city and I don't know a single person who orders groceries online. Smallish shops with bike racks in front of the door are simply too convenient, seems hard to beat. Next few days shopping can easily be done in 15mn on the way back home.

dottjt• 8 months ago

Maybe it's different in Europe, but at least in Australia you end up paying more at smaller shops, so I tend to avoid them. Is this the case in Europe as well?

istinetz• 8 months ago

judging by his name, he is perhaps in Sofia. I am also living here, and can confirm that many middle class people order groceries online.

ekianjo• 8 months ago

Smallish shops with bike racks in front of the door are simply too convenient

Most people don't live in city centers. Because they are the most expensive places to live in.

TechnicalVault• 8 months ago

In the London suburbs you see the grocery delivery vans out and about all day every day. It very much depends on the neighbourhood though, mostly the slightly posh mums or elderly ones ordering.

roryirvine4• 8 months ago

I live in inner London. I have multiple grocery shops around me - within 10 minutes' walk I have a fishmonger, two butchers, two delicatessens, three bakeries, three greengrocers, four mid-sized organic/international grocers, six patisseries, a large Lidl, and a very large Sainsbury's supermarket.

I visit those local shops once or twice almost every day to pick up fresh bits and pieces - but I still get bulky or heavy stuff delivered by Ocado (toilet roll, washing powder, everyday wine, that sort of thing).

MEMORYC_RRUPTED• 8 months ago

I live in a dense European city and all I ever do is order groceries online. I can order larger amounts in one go, so, batch order once every two weeks or so.

Instead of having to fight with a machine to give back my empty cans/plastic bottles, I can just give the delivery person a crate and get my money back.

Doesn't capture all my groceries, I love biking or walking to a smaller shop on occasion, or if I have a specific craving, but 90% of my groceries is delivery.

danielbln2• 8 months ago

Berlin here, people order from bike delivery grocery stores all the time. Not necessarily to do your weekend shopping, but still.

tpm• 8 months ago

I live in a not-so-dense European city (Bratislava) and several our neighbours here in the extended city centre order groceries online, although we have a small shop within 100m and supermarkets within 2km of driving. It's very convenient for parents staying at home, for example.

chickory3• 8 months ago

I live in a dense European city and I don't know a single person who orders groceries online.

I live in the U.S. and have almost never used a service like Instacart. Also, when I see the item I’m trying to order in Amazon is fulfilled by Whole Foods, I typically don’t buy it, because of the additional cost.

I’d rather suffer a small amount of inconvenience to save several dollars on groceries, and often it may mean that I may need to order a different brand to pick up a similar item at a local store.

However, I’ll gladly pay a little additional money for Amazon for many other items, because it’s convenient, shipping is included in Prime, and because I can get what I want.

I make the majority of my retail purchases at a supermarket, followed by Amazon online (Prime only), then a very small percentage in-person at Target, Walmart, or a hardware/home supplies store or some random online retailer.

The best I can do to “shop local” is to use a supermarket chain; there is no mom-and-pop to support that isn’t a chain unless it’s a restaurant. I don’t pretend that this is actually “shopping locally”.

I’ve only participated in a boycott once or twice, because there is typically a practical reason for shopping when and where I do- either I need to shop then because I don’t get out much, or there’s a sale with actually lower prices, rather than the frequent “increase the price just to cut it to get you to order more” thing, which I also get sucked into, because I don’t have time to price shop, unless it’s with camelcamelcamel for Amazon.

Mars008• 8 months ago

There are old, disabled, sick who rather by online than walk. Normally I walk about a mile to grocery store several times a week. But when sick Amazon fresh or whole food is the best price/quality/time option.

crazygringo2• 8 months ago

I find online grocery shopping shines for heavy and bulky things that are a huge pain to schlep home otherwise, especially stuff that lasts a while.

All juices/waters/beers/wines, paper towels, lots of oranges/grapefruits, cleaning products like bleach/detergent, etc. When they carry them up to your fourth-floor door it's just so much easier.

The smallish shops are good for stuff you can then easily carry in a bag by hand -- meat, veg, cheese, fresh bread.

rsynnott7• 8 months ago

I live literally five minutes walk from a decently sized supermarket, ten minutes from another, and ten minutes on the bus from a great big one. One of my neighbours still gets supermarket delivery. There seems to be some sort of market for it, anyway...

wiether3• 8 months ago

I have this conversation regularly with friends, family, coworkers...

And I've not yet been able to establish the right criteria to guess how a person is buying their groceries.

Location, age, income, number of people in the household, physical ability...

A single guy living in the city center with good income? Takes his car to go in big supermarket outside the city.

A family with four kids living in the suburbs? Goes everyday in the small shops.

mikaoj85• 8 months ago

Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.

This has been solved by Pio (by AutoStore)

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

Autostore is great, but it's a small component for a business to be profitable end-to-end. Maybe 20% of the whole thing.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months ago

I see Ocado vans driving up to deliver on the Isle of Skye, which I guess must come from either Fort William or Inverness.

I can't imagine it's especially profitable to deliver a bag of food in a refrigerated van to somewhere that's nearly four hours driving each way.

rsynnott7• 8 months ago

I'd guess that they make a loss on this, but that they accept some losses in exchange for being able to say "we cover the whole country!" This is the case for pretty much any delivery business.

jon-wood3• 8 months ago

I think there's a space for something in between Ocado and Uber Eats, in the 2010s I worked for a startup where you could book an Ocado style delivery slot for the next day from a bunch of different butchers, bakers, etc and then we'd send a van round to collect from all of them and deliver it to you. Annoyingly they ran out of money just a little bit too soon, I'm pretty sure if they'd managed to hold out until 2020 they'd have seen a huge increase in sales as everyone fully got on board with online delivery and been laughing.

I think the big win with that model vs Ocado is that scaling down is fine, you work with whatever shops are in the area and don't need to deal with building fulfilment centres. Maybe you need a car park somewhere to put the vans overnight. Scaling up is a case of moving into different areas, or onboarding new shops. Absolutely agreed that last mile is a nightmare but we mostly had it down I think, the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.

mikkupikku• 8 months ago

VC reinvents the milk man (who used to deliver much more than just milk.)

no_wizard• 8 months ago

the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.

Why not have drivers verify the order with the store? Like have the store folks walk through the pick ups. It might be slower up front, but it would save lots of time and money for everyone in the long run. One of those slow is smooth and smooth is fast situations. Alternatively, the drivers should have a book they could match pics to items perhaps

The other thing I wonder if it would be possible, would be to reduce revenue share for stores that routinely had issues with accuracy, but that means you'd need leverage, and you simply may not have it.

vector_spaces• 8 months ago

I worked in this business for over 15 years on the tech and business sides and I can say that the traditional VC-funded startup regime is fundamentally incompatible with the basic realities of the food industry. What is sort of funny about it is that in many areas there are local companies that have been around for many years doing this fantastically. As other commenters pointed out, this is essentially the milkman model.

There are a number of extremely difficult problems that are definitionally insurmountable on the timescales that VC operates -- paramount among them being the establishment of trust and mutualistic relationships with your vendors/stores, customers, and employees.

You are right that there is such a space, it just won't happen in the context of a startup taking VC cash.

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

FC's can have very efficient fundamentals if done right. Sharing shops with direct customers is very problematic - while appealing, the scaling just doen't work for them very well. They're also subject to a lot of variability due to contention with said customers.

Onavo• 8 months ago

So who's their target customer? Are we talking about Amazon/Temu scale here?

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

Seems so, but the economics for groceries don't work like that since you don't ship a slice of meat and a bottle of milk like you ship a 512GB SD card or a smartphone.

PeterStuer2• 8 months ago

I've done a few projects in (traditional, not pure ecommerce) retail, and in my experience it is a very low margin business.

This contrasts sharply with being an innovator in the robotics space, which typically is extremely capital intensive with very long ROI trajectories.

karamanolev10• 8 months ago

We're proving that automation can happen in that space profitably if done right - carefully, surgically and with a small, focused team. There's Autostore in that space and that system has a massively different economics than Ocado's solution, despite the similarities.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 8 months ago

Does low margin matter? If you are replacing paid people, arent you trying to replace that cost part of the equation?

didntknowyou• 8 months ago

love ocado purely for the reason it's cheaper than other services. i suspect they are subsidising each order to build long term customer behaviour but it's a gamble when customers can eadily switch as the moat is purely pricing

skeptrune• 8 months ago

It's interesting that the problem had more to do with poor decision-making related to warehouse location than robotics limitations.

The title is a red herring.

rimbo7892• 8 months ago

Isn’t that the same thing? Robots without good decision making and working business model are nothing

iambateman• 8 months ago

I’m regularly surprised by how important physically picking out groceries is for a large segment of the population.

We have done grocery pickup for years but the pickup lanes are almost always empty while dozens of shoppers walk into the store.

To me, shopping for groceries by hand is a waste of time but it clearly has some utility for a lot of people.

I wonder if that inertia is making traditional grocery shopping stickier than it should be and disincentivizing optimization.

I hope consumer tastes will change because there’s no reason for us to all walk into a giant warehouse every week.

j_w• 8 months ago

I like to browse what is there and make decisions on what I'll be eating based on what I see.

Purchasing online feels more narrow and has me thinking more about things I've cooked before vs what I might want to try cooking/eating.

marcosdumay3• 8 months ago

Yes, it's not only pickup.

Online retailers UIs are all extremely bad for browsing. One would imagine they would be better, because they can reorganize any way they want, without any limitation, personalize it to each customer, and have several different organizations at the same time available for people to pick what's best each time.

But no, browsing universally sucks.

giraffe_lady• 8 months ago

Food is what we're made of it and the buying, cooking, eating of it provides a lot of the structure of our lives. I'm skeptical of a view that would have us be even further alienated from these activities.

Shopping for food is important to me because food is important to me, and I have no desire to change this despite how "inefficient" it may be. This attitude has already very nearly optimized out most of the texture of daily life to no benefit that is apparent to me.

opinion3k• 8 months ago

I do most the cooking in my house, and the majority of it is meat and produce. I can say from years of experience that it's easy to grab a bad apple if you aren't paying attention or know about food quality, and from the grocery pickers I've seen, they aren't and don't.

A guitarist doesn't just buy some random guitar from amazon - they see it in person and play it. If you cook and care about your food, using a food service just isn't something you'll want to do.

adamc8• 8 months ago

This. Actually, I would buy a cheap guitar (but not from Amazon), say $400-500, for a purpose like having one to place when visiting relatives at Christmas. But I wouldn't buy a nice guitar without inspecting and playing it.

VLM4• 8 months ago

I worked at a food store as a student a long time ago. Remarkably few customers are weekly. We did sell entire cartloads of food on certain days at certain times but it's pretty rare. Most of the people walking in will have to skip a meal that day if they did not stop at the store for just one thing. Then add some impulse purchases. Most people walk out with one grocery bag, some walk out with only one item. Where I lived, most of this behavior was poor planning not financial. Most of the items were pretty nice, not the cheapest. People who can't plan ahead to have enough eggs or whatever will never plan ahead enough for the enormous latency of very slow delivery. Those eggs they're buying, will be cooking mere minutes after purchase not hours.

Nextgrid• 8 months ago

I can pick my groceries faster and with less aggravation than I can navigate the online ordering UI's dark patterns and attempts to get me to "engage".

rangestransform• 8 months ago

I noticed recently that my local trader joes is laid out like a physical dark pattern to get me to spend more money and buy shit I don’t need

Night_Thastus• 8 months ago

I'd imagine most people aren't 100% positive on what they want to get beforehand. Sometimes you only realize you want something after passing by it. Maybe it's something you haven't gotten in awhile and hadn't considered beforehand.

And even if you are completely sure on what you want in advance, having someone else do it is not always great. At least with Instacart, the person doing the shopping frequently didn't know where something was and just assumed it was 'out' and tried to substitute it (badly). There was all this awful delay and back-and-forth and crappy picures with the person shopping to try to get the right thing.

Doing it yourself doesn't have that problem. You know what you want, why you want it, and what you're willing to bend on. No, X brand cheese is not a substitute for Y branch I wanted, never do that. But yes, Z brand and type of milk is fine compared to what I wanted and I know they are frequently out.

Grocery store employees aren't any better at this, btw. Especially since the stores like to re-arrange on a monthly basis.

nickpsecurity• 8 months ago

They go in to see, hear, and smell good things. They experience some products first-hand in a way that shows whether they're as advertised or not. They also know what's out of stock with many, immediate substitution options. There's also more coupon, markdown, or haggling opportunities for those who want them.

Finally, walking into stores lets you connect to people. Those who repent and follow Jesus Christ are told to share His Gospel with strangers so they can be forgiven and have eternal life. We're also to be good to them in general, listening and helping, from the short person reaching for items too high to the cashier that needs a friendly word.

We, along with non-believers, also get opportunities out of this when God makes us bump into the right people at the right time. They may become spouses, friends, or business partners. It's often called networking. However, Christians are to keep in mind God's sovereign control of every detail. Many are one-time or temporary events or observations just meant to make our lives more interesting.

Most of the above isn't available in online ordering which filters almost all of the human experience down to a narrow, efficient process a cheap AI could likely do. That process usually has no impact on eternity for anyone. Further, it has less impact on other people. Then, I have less of the experiences God designed us to have. Which includes the bad ones that build our character, like patience and forgiveness.

So, while I prefer online shopping, I try to pray God motivate me to shop in stores at times and do His will in there. Many interestings things, including impacts on people, continue to happen. Some events hit the person so hard that, even as a non-believer, they know God was behind it. I'm grateful for these stores that provide these opportunities to us.

nunez2• 8 months ago

Speaking during an earnings call, interim Kroger CEO Ron Sargent — who took over in March after McMullen’s sudden departure following an ethics probe — said the company would conduct a “full site-by-site analysis” of the Ocado network.

Sounds like there were some politics involved in the original decision.

VLM4• 8 months ago

All delivery services so far, have been partial emulations of a concierge service including the high cost, but have made the user suffer thru the friction instead of the human concierge.

I don't see a way around this using mere technology. Either the service quality will have to be low, or the cost will have to be prohibitively high, or the people providing the service will have to be very poor.

We have solutions going back centuries that work. If you need more than an occasional concierge service you hire a chef as an employee. At some point it makes more sense to hire a part time chef than to pay enormous extra fees for giant shopping robots. Perhaps the economic decline from AI will make the idea of having house servants more acceptable to the very few people still having an income. Most strategies to replace high labor cost people with technology miss the point of long term permanent economic decline. We don't have a problem of too many financially successful people LOL if anything the problem is a severe lack of them.

Its kind of like cars. You have to unperson poor people who know how to drive if you want success with computer driven cars. This is the same concept but for hiring a servant to cook.

Also its very hard to scale royalty. If only the local equivalent of royalty can afford to pay to make the effort required to shop and cook and drive disappear, its going to be hard to dotcom scale that to billions of customers if there's only a couple multimillionaires who don't care about the price.

Trying to automate food shopping is like trying to go back to full service gas stations. Nobody wants it so its an uphill battle to sell.

throw7• 8 months ago

Around me, the online grocery shopping and pickup is still pretty popular post-covid. There's always a worker or two going around the store picking up for the online orders, so there's room here for some type of site-local automation (not remote robotic fulfillment centers, i could of told you that would be way too costly comparatively).

However, robotics that can navigate an existing retail grocery store is not here. yet.

wayeq• 8 months ago

Kroger said on Tuesday that its decision to close the three robotic facilities, along with other adjustments to its e-commerce operations, would provide a $400 million boost as it looks to improve e-commerce profitability.

Amazing that both opening and subsequently closing the facilities could provide a boost to profitability.

bunabhucan• 8 months ago

Sargent also said Kroger would refocus its e-commerce efforts on its fleet of more than 2,700 grocery supermarkets because it believed that its stores gave it a way to “reach new customer segments and expand rapid delivery capabilities without significant capital investments.”

Someone didn't read the 26 year old Webvan case study at CEO-school.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=26728

DoctorOetker• 8 months ago

Those robots consume quite a bit of energy, I think racks hanging on linkages constraining their orientation (so they don't tilt) and constrain their translational motion to cycloids, so that a hanging rack can be let loose, swing across the lowest point and be caught at approximately the starting height but on the other side.

From wikipedia,

"The cycloid, with the cusps pointing upward, is the curve of fastest descent under uniform gravity (the brachistochrone curve). It is also the form of a curve for which the period of an object in simple harmonic motion (rolling up and down repetitively) along the curve does not depend on the object's starting position (the tautochrone curve)."

So swinging a rack along the cycloid is the fastest motion without having to contribute energy (apart from that to overcome friction etc.).

So you can have a large number of racks in the "left" position, choose to open a passage between racks 34 and 35 by having all racks >=35 swing to the right position. In this way all N racks can be accessed with only the loss of space of a single planar passage.

If everything which enters is weighed before insertion, the loading and unloading could happen near reversibly by arming or releasing appropriate counterweights.

Kinetic energy can also be stored gravitationally: accelerate (by dropping the weight) and decelerate (by lifting it again) for quick motions.

Better design for the ultimate cost center, energy consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloid

Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far

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