Instacart Wants to Replace Army of Gig Shoppers With Robots
Bloomberg 1 hr ago
(Bloomberg)
Instacart Inc. has an audacious plan to replace its army of gig shoppers with robots part of a long-term strategy to cut costs and put its relationship with supermarket chains on a sustainable footing.
The plan, detailed in documents reviewed by Bloomberg, involves building automated fulfillment centers around the U.S., where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup while humans gather produce and deli products. Some facilities would be attached to existing grocery stores while larger standalone centers would process orders for several locations, according to the documents, which were dated July and December.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says there's nothing in federal law that can prevent an employer from compelling employees to be vaccinated
(Bloomberg) It started in Montana. The governor, desperate to fill record numbers of new weekly job postings, announced plans to scrap the payment of beefed-up federal unemployment benefits. Two days later, South Carolina followed. Then, in a rapid-fire rush, so too did about 20 other states, including Texas on Monday.The governors all Republicans are inserting themselves in the middle of what has become the hottest debate surrounding the biggest economy in the world: Are the enhanced benefits, which can swell unemployed workers’ monthly checks to near or even above their pre-pandemic wages, discouraging millions of Americans from looking for jobs as Covid-19 restrictions ease?To these governors and their supporters, the answer is an emphatic yes. The $300 weekly bonus payments need to be eliminated to keep the recovery humming along and to prevent labor shortages from further fanning inflation, they say.Those on the other side led by the Biden administration point to