I ran into Tally the inventory robot in the grocery store last night. I think it’s a good thing — letting a robot do the labor-intensive and repetitive process of physical inventory checking.
‘Yes, but does the store not have a count of the SKUs* on the shelf in its database, anyway? one might ask. The store does, but human shoppers take items off the shelf and misplace it when putting it back, or – rarely, I hope – steal it. Or employees could unpack items in the wrong location, or forget to remove sale prices, and so on. So there are always discrepancies between the SKU count in the database and the physical count on the shelf.
*Stock keeping unit
