Faster Delivery: GrubHub Tests Drones in Ann Arbor At U of M
Those TV commercials where the pizza delivery guys you keep seeing delivering, not only pizza but also ranch dressing, are pretty close to being a thing of the past. Not the commercials, but the delivery guys are pretty close to being dinosaurs.
Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but food delivery service Grubhub is field testing Russian made drones, in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan. Their hope is to have drones operating this fall at some 250 college campuses. Beyond that, who knows?
A Russian internet company (what could possibly go wrong?) Yandex-NV is doing their testing at the University of Michigan, according to Bloomberg. Domino's is testing self-driving pods, and one company in California has robotic devices that can deliver indoors.
The companies claim it's for places that don't have much car access or other restrictions. It also works during extreme winter weather. But this is also one way to not have to pay a person, and nothave to worry about hiring issues, not to mention security, but eventually, the question needs to asked, where are people going to get the entry level jobs? Since Grubhub seems to be focusing on college campuses, let's start there. How many people worked food delivery when they were in school, just to make some money to pay expenses? If those jobs are gone, then what? Are those people then going to migrate to other food service jobs. Restaurants are having a terrible time right now staffing? Will this solve that problem?
This current technological revolution may come at a major societal price. We'll see how it plays out.