Oct 11, 2026 · 5 min · 4 segments
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Walmart's multibillion-dollar, decade-long effort to automate roughly 200 U.S. warehouses is mired in physical-world problems: its twenty-year-old…
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Walmart's decade-long, multi-billion-dollar push to run its warehouses with robots is stuck on cardboard boxes and frozen turkeys.
Walmart has more than 140,000 warehouse workers, and the Journal says the machines still can't do a lot of what those people do.
Its supply chain chief, Rob Montgomery, calls where they are right now peak complexity.
Start with the boxes.
Walmart has shipped in the same cardboard box for more than 20 years, with workers told to reuse them to save money.
It turns out the box is an inch and a half too tall for the new machines, so Walmart is throwing them all out for a shorter one that has to be taped shut, which costs more.
So the warehouse is adapting to the robot, not the other way around?
That's the pattern all the way down.
The job that beat them longest is called break pack, which just means taking items out of a case to ship one at a time.
Years of tests either didn't work or cost too much.
And the answer they landed on is small wheeled robots with sensors now rolling out to more warehouses.
And the turkeys?
A newly automated grocery warehouse in California a few years ago, right before Thanksgiving.
The robotic arms fumbled the big frozen birds, and Walmart routed turkeys through neighboring warehouses that still had people.
Walmart's test site in Brooksville, Florida, is what Walmart calls nearly fully automated, meaning about 80% of the inventory moves by machine.
The rest, the big screen TVs and the jumbo bags of dog food, still needs hands.
That sounds like the robots are winning, not losing.
What's the catch?
On volume, they are winning, but not yet on cost.
And the journal's source says an automated grocery warehouse can run a power bill above $800,000 a month at peak, against about $250,000 when people did the work.
Triple the power bill.
And I'm guessing the people who fix the robots don't work for forklift wages.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Walmart's decade-long, multi-billion-dollar push to run its warehouses with robots is stuck on cardboard boxes and frozen turkeys.
Walmart has more than 140,000 warehouse workers, and the Journal says the machines still can't do a lot of what those people do.
Its supply chain chief, Rob Montgomery, calls where they are right now peak complexity.
Start with the boxes.
Walmart has shipped in the same cardboard box for more than 20 years, with workers told to reuse them to save money.
It turns out the box is an inch and a half too tall for the new machines, so Walmart is throwing them all out for a shorter one that has to be taped shut, which costs more.
So the warehouse is adapting to the robot, not the other way around?
That's the pattern all the way down.
The job that beat them longest is called break pack, which just means taking items out of a case to ship one at a time.
Years of tests either didn't work or cost too much.
And the answer they landed on is small wheeled robots with sensors now rolling out to more warehouses.
And the turkeys?
A newly automated grocery warehouse in California a few years ago, right before Thanksgiving.
The robotic arms fumbled the big frozen birds, and Walmart routed turkeys through neighboring warehouses that still had people.
Walmart's test site in Brooksville, Florida, is what Walmart calls nearly fully automated, meaning about 80% of the inventory moves by machine.
The rest, the big screen TVs and the jumbo bags of dog food, still needs hands.
That sounds like the robots are winning, not losing.
What's the catch?
On volume, they are winning, but not yet on cost.
And the journal's source says an automated grocery warehouse can run a power bill above $800,000 a month at peak, against about $250,000 when people did the work.
Triple the power bill.
And I'm guessing the people who fix the robots don't work for forklift wages.
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