[Maceman]

Sorry, Orchard, I try to do my business with humans. I can appreciate that you want to cut costs by eliminating sales personnel. Good for you! Too bad you’ll never see me again as a customer....

That's OK. There are plenty of technology-loving millennials waiting to take your place.

Then again, even the robots may find themselves out of jobs as most retail establishments lose their customers to the online retailers.

Wouldn't that be a kick on the head? You invest in a robot company only to find the robots in the scrap heaps, having been disintermediated by online commerce.

What a world.

[catnipman]

“Wouldn’t that be a kick on the head? You invest in a robot company only to find the robots in the scrap heaps, having been disintermediated by online commerce. “

Probably the robot companies could easily adapt to providing “picker” robots for the warehouse end of online commerce. Those places are nearly fully automated now, with human pickers essentially being parts plugged into the picker machine anyway, since they wear headsets where a computer tells them what to pick and what delivery box to put it in. Everything else is automated. Right now the only reason the pickers themselves aren’t being replaced with robots is that humans have better manual dexterity.