Retail Warehouses run by Gap, Zappos and Staples now use robots to "pick" products from their shelves and ship them to you.
The robots are manufactured from a company called Kiva Systems.
One of the main advantage of using the above systems is, it reduces energy costs, since they dont need any lights or climatic control. Also, seems it takes just 12 min from the time a customer places an order to the time order is ready to put on a truck.!!!
Have a look at the following video, which shows the robotic distribution in a warehouse:
Source:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots.html
