Unless you can make something generalized enough to do _other_ (profitable for the rental robot owners) tasks outside the BlackFriday/Xmas shopping season, you've still got the same problem (though more power to you if you can make that problem become the robot rental industry's problem instead of yours…)
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110614005178/en/Kiva...
> "Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals."
This would work if different businesses have significantly different seasonalities - but on the aggregate in North America this is not true. Amazon gets the same Xmas rush as Wal-Mart, along with Target, Macy's, and whatnot. The number of businesses whose rush season is out of sync with Xmas is quite low. In fact, on the whole, retail basically rises and falls all at once throughout the year.
> "Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers?"
AFAIK Amazon already does this :) Look up "Fulfillment by Amazon".
So they do! It looks really expensive, though. Like more than $2 for a t-shirt. I wonder how that compares to doing it yourself at scale.
with the obvious suggestion here that Amazon might be best-poised to get into this
