Walmart upends the minimum wage debate by adding on a fleet of robots

In a blow to the minimum wage campaign targeting Walmart, the superstore company says they will expand their fleet of robots at their stores.

Walmart will add 4,000 robots to replace human workers doing mundane work at its stores and facilities.

They made the announcement in a blog post explaining their plans for "automated assistants."

Smart assistants have huge potential to make busy stores run more smoothly, so Walmart has been pioneering new technologies to minimize the time an associate spends on the more mundane and repetitive tasks like cleaning floors or checking inventory on a shelf. This gives associates more of an opportunity to do what they're uniquely qualified for: serve customers face-to-face on the sales floor.

The post says they will order 1,500 floor-cleaning robots, 300 shelf-scanners, 1,200 truck unloaders, and 900 pickup towers for online orders.

In January of 2018 Walmart announced that they were raising their employee wages, and then immediately followed with layoffs to their workforce.

Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made it a personal mission to pressure Walmart to raise their wages to $15 a hour in November 2018.

Here's a video of some of the Walmart robots:

Walmart Launches Small Army Of Autonomous Scanning Robots.www.youtube.com