Why Robots are Strolling the Aisles of Walmart

Since most people do their grocery shopping at normal hours during the day, they don’t see the overnight stockers that come out late at night and work until the sun comes up. They’re distinguishable by the box knives they carry around in their aprons, the scar tissue all over their hands from being cut by said box knives, and (at least for 24-hour grocery stores) the thrill they get from chasing people down who are stupid enough to try and make a dash out the door with beer they haven’t paid for. The 512,690 people around the nation who stock shelves don’t get paid very much, on average about $12 an hour. Those jobs aren’t being threatened yet, but the notion of night stocking may be coming to an end for other reasons.

In our recent article on Artificial Intelligence and Dividend Growth Investing, we talked about how the only way companies like Walmart (NYSE:WMT) will realize meaningful future growth is by adopting disruptive technologies – like artificial intelligence (AI) – which they’ve committed to spending billions of dollars on. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though when you realize that we now have robotic forklifts and commercial floor cleaning robots. How long will it be until a Walmart store can be