"Zero-contact" delivery, robots penetrate the logistics industry across the United States

What changes have taken place in your life before and after the holidays? This sudden epidemic has created many unexpected things.

The children didn't expect that in addition to Chinese, math, and English classes... there is also a type of class called online classes.

People in the workplace never expected that work is not the hardest part, but working from home is.

Consumers didn’t expect that the people who “stole vegetables” in the middle of the night 10 years ago would “grab vegetables” at 3 a.m. 10 years later.

The merchants did not expect that one day, the store would be empty, ordering would be “zero contact”, delivery would be “zero contact”, service would be “zero contact”…

Chongqing's hotpot industry saved itself by launching "zero-contact" hotpot takeout. Within a few days, the total number of takeout hotpot orders from 72 stores of 35 hotpot brands exceeded 10,000, with sales exceeding 3 million yuan.

The demand for major fresh food delivery companies such as Hema Fresh, Dingdong Maicai, and MissFresh has increased by a hundred times compared to the same period last year.

Consumers only need to move their fingers at home, but merchants have to run around.

When employees at different links of the supply chain are unable to return to work in a timely manner due to restrictions on travel, quarantine and other policies, a huge labor gap has been created in the express supply chain, posing a huge challenge to each company's logistics and transportation.

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the express delivery and logistics industry has risen rapidly. Coupled with the fact that consumers' requirements for speed have gradually increased, two-day delivery has become the standard that people expect, and the time requirements for food delivery have become more stringent.

Globally, the global food delivery market was worth $100 billion in 2017, while package delivery was even bigger, at $300 billion. The “last mile” delivery share, which is within a radius of 3-5 kilometers, accounts for about $80 billion. It can be said that “this delivery market is huge!”

In response to consumers’ demands for faster and cheaper delivery, many warehouses have successfully replaced some labor with machines, but the last mile (the distance between the store and the user) is still mainly manual delivery, and it is difficult to solve efficiency problems through process improvement. With the surge in delivery demand, these businesses are gradually unable to bear the high delivery costs, and instead put their hopes on robots to reduce operating costs. This reality provides huge market opportunities.

They were already facing the problem of staff shortage, and they also had to consider that due to the epidemic, consumers were not only concerned about "what to eat", but also about "eating safely", so how to provide "zero-contact delivery service" has also added a lot of trouble to many businesses.

Solution: Robot door-to-door service

Domestic hospitals and hotels were the first to use robots to provide "zero-contact" services.

More than 5,700 hotels under Huazhu use robots to deliver items to guest rooms instead of manually. The infectious disease ward of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital uses robots to deliver medicine, meals, and recycle bedding and medical waste.

Although robot delivery has not yet been officially put into use in the logistics sector, it does not prevent talented netizens from coming up with various ideas, such as modifying their own remote-controlled cars/small robots. Although these are simple and have limited delivery distances, they can solve temporary problems.

In the United States, the fresh food delivery and express delivery industries are actively engaging with these self-driving logistics robots to test safety, explore industry standards, and increase promotion efforts.

Walmart and Kroger, the big brothers in the U.S. supermarket chain industry, and Domino's Pizza, which has a high demand for home delivery, have signed up for the delivery robot Nuro R2.
　　

Recently, R2 obtained federal safety approval to serve community residents and transport daily necessities and fresh food. This delivery vehicle will soon be put into use in the Houston area of ​​Texas.

On one hand, the supermarket loads the ingredients into self-driving delivery vehicles according to the consumers' orders, and on the other hand, the consumers quickly pick up the goods at their doorsteps, achieving zero-contact delivery throughout the process.

Obtaining federal government safety approval marks Nuro as the first special-purpose autonomous vehicle approved for use in U.S. history.

In the safety approval letter, Nuro was required to have a service life of only two years, as a light robot vehicle it was not allowed to carry passengers, it could only travel at a speed of less than 25 miles per hour, and the total production of R2 was not allowed to exceed 5,000 vehicles.

The R2 is much smaller than an ordinary vehicle, and its doors can be opened upwards to ensure maximum exposure of the cargo compartment.

R2 will deliver the groceries, fresh produce and food ordered by users to the designated location. Customers can unlock the vehicle to pick up the goods after entering the password. Kroger plans to charge customers a delivery fee of $5.99 per order. Walmart and Domino's have not yet announced their charging plans.

Due to speed limits and to ensure the freshness of the delivered goods, R2's delivery range will be set within a certain community, and there will be no long-distance transportation like delivering goods from Beijing's Zhongguancun to Tongzhou.

Self-driving vehicles have been attracting a lot of attention in the high-tech circles of China and the United States in recent years. In China, there are Meituan, JD Logistics, Geek+, Lingdong Technology, Segway Robotics, etc.

In addition to Nuro, Ford and Agility Robotics have jointly launched a delivery robot. This human-like robot can lift packages weighing up to 40 pounds.

FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies in the United States, announced the launch of FedEx SameDay Bot, a same-day delivery robot that will serve American supermarkets for the last mile of delivery. Signed partners include AutoZone, Lowe's, Pizza Hut, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart.

The food delivery company Doordash chose to cooperate with Starship. After raising US$40 million in its Series A financing in August last year, Starship announced that it would deploy thousands of transport robots on university campuses across the United States within two years.

Marble, which has received investments from Tencent, Maven Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, UpHonest Capital, etc., "will not only expand to food delivery, but also to the delivery of daily necessities, retail, pharmaceuticals and other categories of goods."

Why is “zero-contact” delivery also popular in the United States?

The development of self-driving vehicles is, on the one hand, to free humans from vehicle driving, and on the other hand, to reduce the chance of traffic accidents.

So is there any special significance in developing self-driving vehicles that can deliver goods to your door?

Americans born in the baby boomers generation are accustomed to holding a long list of supermarket shopping lists and pushing shopping carts to browse row by row in the supermarket. However, after them, Americans' interest in supermarket shopping has been declining.

Although businesses have tried every possible way to make shopping more convenient for consumers, such as the emergence of one-stop shopping giants such as Walmart, Costco, and Target, and CVS and Walgreens where you can buy food even in drugstores, they still cannot make Americans fall in love with supermarket shopping again.

In recent years, as millennials in their 20s and 30s have become tired of supermarket shopping, a large number of online shopping and delivery services for daily groceries and fresh food have emerged, such as the famous AmazonFresh.

Just browse around in the American gossip forums and you can find a lot of reasons why Americans hate supermarket shopping:

Hate crowds,

Hate waiting in line to pay,

Hate the slow cashier,

I hate buying too much and then eating half and throwing away the other half.

Hate not being able to find a parking space in a busy parking lot,

I hate having to cook after shopping.

… …

Walmart, the most famous convenience store giant in the United States, is recognized throughout the country as the gathering place where all kinds of weirdos and idiots often hang out. Many consumers who can afford it avoid Walmart.

Low prices and 24-hour business should be one of Walmart's strongest competitive advantages, but it is precisely because of these two factors that the shopping experience at Walmart is like a nightmare. You may encounter homeless people who haven't showered for a long time, or people who are obviously mentally ill and muttering to themselves at any time. You will never get to your checkout counter because there are many shopping carts in front of you that are loaded with enough food to feed a whole person...

Consumers who hate Walmart even set up a website: peopleofwalmart.com

Here are some weird photos taken by everyone in Walmarts across the United States. If you are interested, you can go and take a look.

The decline in enthusiasm for shopping in physical supermarkets has also been confirmed by data.

Federal data from the United States show that young people aged 25-34 now spend an average of $3,539 on supermarket shopping each year, which is actually $1,000 less than their peers in 1990 after taking inflation into account.

This is not because the younger generation of Americans have changed their mindsets and no longer like to shop, but because everyone's money has been dispersed.

Millennials prefer to eat out in restaurants rather than cooking in the kitchen; the rise of food delivery services such as Uber Eats and DoorDash allows diners to enjoy delicious food from all over the world without leaving home;