AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A couple years ago, I started seeing these delivery robots, like, everywhere in certain LA neighborhoods - little cooler-sized boxes with wheels, some with large, blinking, adorable eyes, slowly rolling along sidewalks, crossing intersections and interacting kind of awkwardly with pedestrians. Now, the delivery robots - they are kind of cute. Like, little kids love them, but for some city dwellers, they become this annoying nuisance. Ainsley Harris of Fast Company wrote about how that's playing out in her Chicago neighborhood in a recent piece called "My Neighborhood Is Pushing Back Against Sidewalk Delivery Robots. The Fight's Coming To Your Town Next." Welcome Ainsley.
AINSLEY HARRIS: Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: Well, thank you for being with us. OK. So first, just give us a sense of how widely deployed these little delivery robots are, like, across the country. Do you know how many there are?
HARRIS: Yeah. Coco, which is a company that is active in a number of different cities - Chicago, where I am, LA, Miami, also Helsinki overseas - they're talking about having 10,000 of these things on sidewalks. And then, Serve Robotics, which is also active in LA, Chicago, a handful of other U.S. cities - they already have built 2,000 robots. So...
CHANG: Wow.
HARRIS: ...The scale is increasing pretty fast.
CHANG: OK. Now, I personally have never received a delivery from one of these little robots. Are they mostly delivering food or are they also delivering merchandise? Are they like little miniature Amazon trucks now?
HARRIS: They would love to be little mini Amazon trucks...
CHANG: (Laughter).
HARRIS: ...At some point in the future. That is definitely the vision that they are selling to investors. But for the time being, they are focused on restaurant delivery. Both companies have partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash. And so yeah, they are, you know, sending burritos, burgers - you name it - around neighborhoods.
CHANG: And how exactly do you get your stuff out when it arrives at your door or your apartment lobby?
HARRIS: Yeah. Usually, you have a code that you see in the delivery app, and that will open up the robot. It's quite seamless from a customer perspective. And they've also designed it to be really easy for the restaurants to operate as well.
CHANG: And I assume you do not have to tip a robot or do you (laughter)?
HARRIS: I think the robot wouldn't know what to do if you tipped it. Maybe it would be appreciative. Yeah. I mean, the real selling point for consumers and for restaurants is the lower cost. You know, the delivery economy is obviously booming. I think it's now 3 out of 4 restaurant meals is actually eaten outside of the restaurant. So there's huge demand, and restaurants can't really keep up with the delivery. So I think a lot of folks are saying, you know, how do we lower the cost? How do we do more deliveries? How do we...
CHANG: Right.
HARRIS: ...Keep up with all this demand? And, you know, Serve Robotics, for example, is saying that, you know, at scale, it will be able to do a delivery for as little as $1, which is...
CHANG: Wow.
HARRIS: ...Much cheaper than a driver.
CHANG: OK. So it makes sense why these robots are ever proliferating, but what sorts of concerns have people in your Chicago neighborhood been raising about them?
HARRIS: Yeah. People in my neighborhood are not so happy about the robots.
CHANG: (Laughter).
HARRIS: We appear to be the first city where there is a petition to ask for them to be banned. And that petition was started by a guy who lives around the corner from me.
CHANG: Oh.
HARRIS: He had a bad encounter with one of the robots when he was out with his family. He has two young kids and...
CHANG: Wait. Explain the bad encounter...
HARRIS: Yeah.
CHANG: ...'Cause it's a robot (laughter).
HARRIS: I think they had, like, a weird sort of stand-off, and he has - yeah - two little ones. And he found it very unnerving, I think, thinking about, you know, if you have a toddler on a bike or, you know, you're someone who needs special assistance when you're out and about, how does that sort of affect you to be navigating sidewalks with these new entrants? And he seems to have really found a receptive audience for this...
CHANG: Yeah.
HARRIS: ...Petition.
CHANG: I mean, I've seen incidents where people - that they're so annoyed by these robots that they vandalize them or they tip them over. They kick them. There's a lot of, like, weird aggression aimed at these robots once in a while, yeah?
HARRIS: Yes. And people are also posting all the blooper reels on social media. If you want to go find some, you know, crashes or other incidents, it's all there. But some of the incidents have also been more serious. All of the robots have a little flag kind of at eye level that is meant to make them easier for cars to see when they're crossing the street. But it turns out a man in Chicago actually sort of stumbled into one of these flags and had to have stitches around his eye area.
CHANG: Ooh.
HARRIS: So, you know, and I've also heard about feet being run over. The Serve robot, for example, weighs 220 pounds when it's empty. So, you know, these are big vehicles in some ways, sharing the sidewalk with people.
CHANG: OK. But you have talked to several companies that make these robots. How are they responding to complaints, like the ones we're talking about?
HARRIS: Yeah. They are very engaged with local governments. I think that's one difference we're seeing. You know, we probably - if you live in a city, you probably lived through the scooter era...
CHANG: Oh, yes.
HARRIS: ...And I think we've all learned. Yes.
CHANG: I've tripped over a few of them before.
HARRIS: Exactly. Exactly. People really do not like the scooters, and I think the companies have realized they need to engage a lot earlier. Even though, you know, Coco, for example, really has only raised a Series A, it already has folks focused on policy on the team. And I think, you know, Serve similar. They are also engaging very early. They know they need to kind of get out front and be part of the policy conversation before there's a real backlash.
CHANG: Ainsley Harris is a senior writer at Fast Company. Thank you so much for joining us today.
HARRIS: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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