AI news · Robotics · retail
Walmart’s warehouse robots run into costly snags, WSJ reports
Small wheeled robots struggle with heavy goods and dust, peak power bills at automated grocery sites top three times the manual level, and Walmart is replacing its boxes.
Robots are proving harder and costlier to fit into roughly 200 Walmart supply-chain buildings in the US than the retailer expected, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday 9 October 2026, as summarised by Yahoo Finance. Rob Montgomery, who leads supply-chain operations for Walmart US, told the paper the company is at “peak complexity”.
At Brooksville in Florida, its most automated site, robots move about 80 per cent of the inventory; heavy items such as dog food and large televisions make up much of the rest, the New York Post reports from the same story. To suit the small wheeled robots, Walmart is swapping cardboard boxes it has reused for more than two decades for ones 1.5 inches shorter that must be taped shut. Symbotic, the robot maker in which Walmart holds 12.6 per cent according to Yahoo Finance, says under 10 per cent of its machines were in repair at any time last year and about 5 per cent now. Dust alone can stop them.
At peak, an automated grocery warehouse can run up a monthly electricity bill above $800,000, people familiar with the matter told the paper, Yahoo Finance reports; the mostly manual sites paid about $250,000. Walmart expects automation spending to peak this year and next and says high staff turnover means no layoffs are needed.
Walmart’s figures give any retailer pricing warehouse robots a benchmark: uptime, power and packaging all land on the bill.
Sources
- Yahoo Finance: Walmart warehouse automation robots costs complexity. Checked
- New York Post: Walmart’s multibillion-dollar push to replace workers with robots hits snags on dog food, cardboard boxes: report. Checked
Alexandre S.
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