Furthermore, the relevant metric isn't current price, it's the price at the time these get deployed at scale which, for a giant company, is at least 3 - 5 years

Furthermore, the relevant metric isn't current price, it's the price at the time these get deployed at scale which, for a giant company, is at least 3 - 5 years. Large companies can afford to absorb many millions of dollars worth of losses for pilot projects because the learnings have the potential to far outweigh the losses. Even if each of these robots cost a million bucks a piece, if one robot can help Lowes learn something that reduces the cost of future robots by $100, spread across a 10,000 robot deployment, that robot has paid for itself.