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usrevenge t1_j57m05g wrote

Reply to comment by PatrickKieliszek in The Lights Have Been On At a Massachusetts School For Over a Year Because No One Can Turn Them Off by AStartIsBorn

I work at Amazon

There is a big automation push. One of the things being automated is boxes getting labels applied for sorting.

One of the sites near me had a few conveyor lines replaced with this machine back in like September.

It didn't work October they came and fixed it and it broke again shortly after.

November came and the operations team at that building was sick of it and threw it into manual mode.

They spent hundreds of thousands on a these machines and didn't use them 1 time during the holiday season. They just put them in manual which turned it into a dumb conveyor that just move box from point a to b without applying the label. Someone still had to manually scan and put the label on.

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Finagles_Law t1_j5ex9iz wrote

I used to work at a very large online furniture store. A few years back, they were in the middle of increasing their warehouse automation with smart conveyor belts for picking - instead of having humans grab a box off of the belt, a barcode scanner would read the label and divert it automatically to the right truck bay.

It took a good year to get them really working reliably, but in the end they did work, and enabled the dotcom to run with a much leaner warehouse staff.

Make no mistake, this is the way things are headed, and it will get figured out. Picking random items from a shelf is one of the harder automation problems to solve, but it will be solved, and those terrible jobs will be gone forever.

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