Transcript of Retailers work to make returns easier after holiday season

It might look like something out of a sci-fi film set in the future. But these real-life Wauleys are sending your unwanted items back to the past, back to the retailer they came from.

It is blade runnery in here.

Inside this massive facility for Happy Returns, a company owned by UPS, Chief Operating Officer, Tim Fair, says they're using new technology to tackle an old but growing problem. Some 890 billion a year in merchandise is returned, but on top of that expense is the costly process of getting all that stuff back.

Easy returns are challenging and expensive.

Some companies like Optoro are using AI to analyze giant piles of return clothes like this to determine if and how they can be put back on shelves. Here at Happy Returns, it's all about robots.

How much more efficient is this than a human doing it?

We doubled our productivity when we implemented this. That's a radical advancement. Here's how it works. What do I do? Okay, so you're going to start your return online.

You take your unwanted gift and drop it off unboxed at a happy return site, which could be inside an Alta store for for example, and it gets shipped here. That's when the robots get to work.

This is what workers are calling the dance floor. More than 100 automated robots pushing packages from retail to the warehouse in an attempt to How would you evolutionize the way we think about returns.

Let's say you're returning an Everlane return. We would combine those items with your return with 10 or 15 other returns that came in that day from a bunch of different brands. That would go to a single container. The Rubble will take it to that retailer shipping box, so an Everlane box. When that box is full, we'll put it on a pallet, and then once a week, we'll ship all those items to Everlane.

The Robots Fair says cut processing times down significantly, meaning that items can get to retailersers and back on the shelf more quickly and cheaply. But do those savings come at a cost?

What about the guys and the girls who work here? Am I looking at people that are going to have their jobs replaced as well?

Most of our employees are very excited. Essentially, we've made the job easier for them and allowed them to move away from more roads or challenging tasks into areas where they could add more value.

What does this look like 5, 10 years from now?

We're looking at robots to unload the trucks. We're committed to this vision and putting together our next round of plans right now.

A new technological revolution in the world of returns. Steve Patterson, NBC News, Valencia, California.

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