My husband works in supply chain engineering, and his clients are ALL moving towards robots and other automated features in warehouses. It used to be the people would assemble boxes, but that’s now completely automated. Bubble packets are dispensed from a machine. Robots come to the person who picks your order, and is then sent away once the order us fulfilled from that location, then delivered to the person who fills the box with your stuff followed by air packets. Then it’s out on a conveyor and sent to the location for outgoing orders. It’s quite a sight to see everything that happens behind the scenes.
The robots are very cost effective when you start talking federal minimum wage of $15/hour. Companies have to cut costs someplace, and a whiny workforce is the first place to cut.
$15/hr translates to about $30/hr after taxes and benefits. That’s $60,000 a year. Robots cost less.