Kroger to Lay Off 3,000 Corporate Employees In AI Restructuring
- Reference: 0186301306
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/10/13/1945200/kroger-to-lay-off-3000-corporate-employees-in-ai-restructuring
- Source link:
> Kroger last month outlined its AI strategy, meant "to improve the customer experience, make work easier for associates and produce better business outcomes." Cincinnati-based Kroger is the largest standalone U.S. supermarket chain with 409,000 employees and more than 2,700 stores operating under various brands, including Ralphs, King Soopers, Smith's and Fred Meyer.
>
> Kroger named former Walmart executive Foran CEO in February, 11 months after the abrupt resignation of its previous CEO. Foran has a reputation for being tech-savvy and detail-oriented. He led Walmart's U.S. division from 2014 to 2019, where he focused on cleaning up stores, ensuring items were in stock and improving the fresh produce selection. He also introduced online ordering and pickup, and accelerated Walmart's digital capabilities.
[1] https://abcnews.com/Business/wireStory/kroger-lay-off-3000-corporate-employees-3-years-137228598
Good luck with that. (Score:2)
The upper end for AI-pilled companies is paying upwards of $7,500 / seat a month. Which would get you some engineer or managers in most parts of the country, or multiple lower level employees. I have no idea what Kroger pays for their AI, but if they think that AI eliminates thousands of jobs then they are using frontier AI at the aforementioned rate. Or they have made a terrible blunder and are going to be short handed.
Most likely they are not using AI for much of anything but don't want to publicly take r
Re: (Score:3)
It's just outsourcing, H1-Bs and age discrimination fueled layoffs. AI is a great cover for that.
Also Trump is wrecking the economy and nobody wants to acknowledge that because he's a vindictive psycho that nobody will stand up to.
Re: (Score:2)
They thought self-check was going to eliminate thousands of jobs. Then they figured out that every 4 self-check registers requires 1 human employee to watch it and handle all the alerts it pops up. Pretty sure that one human employee could scan groceries 4 times faster than people doing it themselves, so those self-check registers are saving them... absolutely nothing. And they are seeing a lot more "shrinkage", although I'm not sure whether it is due to intentional or accidental failure to scan items. When
Re: (Score:2)
> They thought self-check was going to eliminate thousands of jobs. Then they figured out that every 4 self-check registers requires 1 human employee to watch it and handle all the alerts it pops up. Pretty sure that one human employee could scan groceries 4 times faster than people doing it themselves, so those self-check registers are saving them... absolutely nothing. And they are seeing a lot more "shrinkage", although I'm not sure whether it is due to intentional or accidental failure to scan items. When I hear a beep, I assume the item scans. Turn out I can't tell the beep from the register I'm at from the beep of any of the adjacent registers... I now prefer human clerks to make it less likely to get arrested for a mistake.
You read the screen to see the price of the thing you scanned along with the total. Not rocket science. I mean shit happens too, we've all walked out with some security tag a cashier forgot to disable at one point basically same thing.
No Worries..... (Score:1)
They can work the front end as greeters until another position comes available.
Re: (Score:2)
Considering the audiences feelings towards corporations and middle-managers there should be a lot of happy noise.
Cause and Effect. Not AI (Score:2)
AI is a scapegoat here. Prices, and the cut to SNAP benefits equates to the loss in jobs here. We can blame AI for every thing that goes wrong in the meantime.
AI was going to create jobs!! (Score:2)
It hasn't been long enough for us to all forget how they said, "AI is going to create jobs". I'm glad I didn't believe it and I hope nobody else believed it.
H1 bs (Score:2)
We all know what they're doing.