Across the board, the challenges stem from logistics highly dependent on human labor. Even at capacity, the output is limited — human workers can't compete with 80 digital orders coming through in a single hour. As a result, customers have less of a burden when making an order, but they take it on when they wait to pick up their orders.

Today, with the labor shortage alone, the logistics are overwhelmed, and the customer experience inevitably plummets. Therefore, the biggest challenge is upgrading logistics to support a much more streamlined input and output retail system while retaining the same quality of service.

It's not about replacing labor with robotics but addressing the whole operation and business model. Retailers need to start thinking about their business as a single system or robot, rather than a box with independent and heterogenous robots within it.

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