Employees such as checkers are being or have been replaced by self checkout machines. Strange & unhappy shift from customer perspective. A downer.
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Robots won't do the work more efficiently or accurately, not in our lifetime but that don't mean the company won't try it. If you want to blame someone for all this, you can start with medicine, skyrocketing costs, everytime you go to the doctor, the doc puts you on 5 different medications one to treat what the other is doing to you, jacked up out of network unnecessary costs as well as greedy as hell company leaders.
Sadly, automation and self-service is becoming more ubiquitous, so it's not just retail that's being impacted. While I don't see Customers stocking shelves, I can envision robots doing the work more efficiently and accurately. Also, as Kroger becomes more competent with e-commerce, more and more Customers will bypass shopping in stores and just pick up their orders that they placed online earlier. Or they will have their orders delivered straight to their homes. If you think the retail industry is getting hit by online commerce, look at what has happened to stock brokers and travel agents. I haven't used a stock broker to do a trade or travel agency to book a vacation since the 1990s, as I have been doing it myself all online.
I've been in kroger's several times and had customers in the checkout line "Next you know man they will be asking us to stock shelves for them"... "They don't pay me to check myself out.."