PLEASANTON — The robots are coming.
With groceries.
Grocery delivery via robot is now available from the Lucky California supermarket in Pleasanton to about 1,500 homes nearby, after the grocer announced a partnership Wednesday with San Francisco company Starship Technologies.
“I can’t wait to receive my first delivery at my home,” Pleasanton Mayor Carla Brown said Wednesday during an unveiling of a robot fleet at the Lucky store.
The concept is pretty simple. People who want their groceries delivered can download the Starship app, pick out items on the app, pay, and a grocery store employee will collect the items and load them into the robot’s hull, which is lined with an insulated bag.
Then the white plastic robot — which looks something like a cross between a cooler, the helmet worn by RoboCop and a Tesla — begins driving itself to the customer’s home at a clip of up to four miles per hour.
The robots are equipped with an array of cameras and sensors, and use “sophisticated machine learning” and artificial intelligence to travel on sidewalks and avoid obstacles. “The robots can cross streets, climb curbs, travel at night and operate in both rain and snow,” the company said in a statement.
Deliveries will cost most customers $1.99 to $2.99, depending on the distance the robot needs to travel, according to Starship, which some shoppers said seems like a bargain.
“$1.99? Hey, how much is gas?,” Andrew Aragon, 71, of Pleasanton said Wednesday. “What’s your time worth?”
Aragon said younger people commuting to or from work each day could take or leave the delivery service, but “for elderly people, I think it would be fantastic,” he said, as well as for anyone who just can’t make the time to get to the store.
“You’re working at home, you’re online and you can’t leave. And your wife says, ‘Hey, when you go out, we need coffee filters, and we need this and that.’ Lucky is only right around the corner. Just order it. Pay the $1.99,” Aragon said.
The robots can fit about three grocery bags worth of items, and for now, the app limits customers to about 20 items per order. For people with larger families, like Chris Shore, it might not be enough capacity for a full grocery list.
But Shore, 40, who lives nearby, said h would likely try out the service anyhow, as it’s cheaper than other human-based delivery services.
“If it’s $8 for Instacart delivery, and $3 for this, you’re saving $5, plus a tip,” Shore said while leaving the store Wednesday after picking up some yellow onions.
“It kind of sucks for the guy who is doing Instacart,” he said. “It could be taking work from somebody.”
Within the grocery store, however, Bobby McDowell, the head of store operations for Lucky California, said the robots will not replace workers, and if anything, may add hours for some existing staff who will be needed to shop for customers and load the bot.
While Starship’s robots are some of the first doing deliveries from a grocery store in the Bay Area, robots are becoming more commonplace in public as technologies advance.
In the Bay Area in the past several years, robots have been seen baking the occasional pizza, whipping up smooth cappuccinos served up by an automatic arm, cooking melty cheeseburgers or patrolling malls, sometimes running over children’s feet.
Starship’s robots have already made more than 2.5 million deliveries worldwide, including meals through the DoorDash app in Redwood City, as well as ferrying food across some college campuses around the nation.
In 2020, Lucky’s parent company, The Save Mart Companies — which owns Save Mart, Lucky and FoodMaxx stores — partnered with Starship for grocery delivery from a Modesto Save Mart.
McDowell said that program has been “seamless” and has had “an immense amount of success” so far. The store has since expanded its robot delivery service area to encompass about 55,000 homes.
“The guests have absolutely loved it,” he said.
“This is just another option for them, and we think it’s a pretty cool option,” he said of bringing the service to Pleasanton.
Chris Neider, the head of business development for Starship, said he expects the Pleasanton program to expand to cover about 5,000 homes within six weeks, and it could grow from there. The city has permitted the company to operate a maxim of 30 robots at a time in Pleasanton, for now, he said.
The service is appealing because it’s “cool, convenient, fast and also safe during the time of COVID,” Neider said.
“While there are many delivery platforms out there, many of those still require a human to come right to your door. We send a cute, adorable little robot that has the items inside,” he said.
“So all those other channels are still available, but this gives the end customer another experience, another tool to get the stuff they want, when they want it,” he added.
Erika Guadarrama, 36, of Pleasanton, has three young kids, and said she might consider using the service.
“Having kids at home, and having to come with all of them to the store — I’d rather just use that,” she said with a laugh.
Councilmember Valerie Arkin said she would likely try the service out when she’s too busy to make a run to the grocery store.
“To see how these work and the convenience of it for our residents, I think it’s wonderful,” Arkin said.
“I just think it’s a cool apparatus to deliver your groceries. It’s a little futuristic, but I like it,” she said.
While many grocery shoppers did a double-take Wednesday as they walked by the robots lined up outside Lucky, and some took photos of the knee-high machines, most didn’t seem concerned about a possible robot uprising.
“Hey, it’s just technology moving forward,” Aragon said.
“I definitely think artificial intelligence is something to worry about,” Shore said. “But a stupid robot that rolls around? No.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com