Useful Things

There have been days when I wished groceries could just show up without any hassle. It is how it worked from my grandma back in Kolkata. The different vendors would pass under her balcony hawking their wares. She'd lower the wicker basket tied to a rope and get what she wanted. Cash would go down the basket, change would come up. She remained seated in her wooden chair the whole time. 

Robomart is trying to make of that a reality for the rest of us. No driver, no human handoffs just 10 climate-controlled lockers carrying your goods, ready for a seamless, contactless pickup.

Each locker can hold up to 50 pounds, the van runs fully electric, and it can make multiple deliveries in a single run. It’s efficient, practical, and honestly, kind of comforting to think of a little robot zipping through the streets doing the mundane errands we all dread. All of this for $3 per delivery. A tad more expensive than my grandma's arrangements but not so bad in balance.

But beyond convenience, the model hints at a bigger shift: what if labor bottlenecks and inefficiencies could be solved with smart, empathetic design rather than squeezing humans for more output? I want to believe that is there something good about having autonomous helpers take care of small, repetitive tasks, letting us focus on the things that actually matter. As long as we we know what those things are.

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