this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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Walmart is technically competent, but more pragmatic than adventurous. In the past, it has often favored proven systems that deliver reliable returns over expensive, leading-edge alternatives. That has been a smart business strategy for them for the most part, even if they are sometimes late to the party when it comes to innovation.
Amazon has made robotics a core part of its fulfillment model. Ocado designed its grocery fulfillment operation around automation from the outset. This meant major investment in infrastructure, software, and process redesign.
Walmart has invested heavily in robotics, too, but its approach has been more incremental and constrained by the need to modernize an enormous existing network. A bolt-on, if you will.
So I suspect Walmart's problems are partly about its approach and baggage, not the state of robotics. They'll figure it out eventually.
"We'll pay billions in trying to automate things to avoid paying a few million for human employees."
Anyone who has tried to automate anything beyond the most basic step quickly finds out how difficult it is to truly do it with all of the boundary conditions, bad inputs, breaking conditions, etc.
unskilled warehouse workers.
It's ironic to call them unskilled in an article describing how their skills are beyond billion-dollar robots.
Unskilled, but none of the managers I had (not WM, mid size mail order company) could keep up. All of them had broken racking, run the forks through walls, and/or torn dock doors off. They were slow, and would put bad pallets in the racks.
So the company liked doing cutting edge corporate stuff and reading books about various CEOs. One time they had us take skill surveys (thinly veiled IQ tests) to optimize new hires. The first batch was based off the high performance people and all quit after two weeks because they were smart enough to know bullshit. The second group was based off the long timers and also didn’t last because they were dumb as rocks. After that they went back to shotgunning everyone at it and seeing what sticks. Open interviews, always posted.
"Unskilled" meaning you can teach someone to do the job reasonably well off the street in a few hours. Unfortunately robots are not humans and thus need to be meticulously designed while a guy just needs a decent paycheck and benefits.
As a forklift monkey: I hate my job and feel that humans weren’t meant for this monotonous kind of work. Like boomers who screwed in one nut on an assembly line who made enough to provide a family of 4, I’d blow my brains out before I’d do that. So fuck these jobs.
Yeah, the problem isn't automation, it's billionaires pocketing all of the proceeds.
I work in this field and can speak to these systems.
These systems tend to perform quite well as their primary selling point is not necessarily cost reduction, flat, but rather increased revenue through higher and more reliable throughput. The trade off is that these systems are quite complex and normally require a great deal of coordination between the customer who may or may not operate the product and the OEM that builds and maintains it.
In my experience the biggest challenge is defining those responsibilities such that throughput is maintained. These systems are like high performance sports cars, they work well if taken care of and operated skillfully but can degrade faster as a result of lack of experience. Some of our customers permit us (the OEM) to operate and maintain to a greater extent then others. Given we have a greater deal of experience with the tool those customers tend to have measurably better performance.
To give an idea of why this particular industry has a harder time building the talent pool I'm referring to consider the domains that need to be covered.
Electromechanical systems, mobile robots, multi-robot systems, PLC programming, DCS, SCADA, multi-axis robots, VFDs, electrical power systems, relational databases, non-relational databases, message brokers, caching systems, distributed systems, Linux and Windows system administration, networking, industrial networking protocols (it's different), software development, Kubernetes. This is the skill set of one technical professional in this space.
I commonly deal with issues that cover several of those areas simultaneously. E.g. robot communications are slowing down due to full message broker queue which is determined to be caused by a faulty motor causing slippage which leads to a large number of messaged being generated that fill the queue and cause other bots to begin making pathing errors due to communication timeouts.
While I know you wanna stand up for your employer: don't.
Quite literally for your job safety you should delete this post unless you're literally PR and speaking in a way your employer would be fine with.
Most corporate training modules involve clear information you should never post like this because you'll almost certainly get fired.
If you want to share things, post it more as "I work for a company that makes robots like this. The problem with our biggest warehouse clients is X, where our smaller ones is Y, so that's probably the case here too." Never directly show your employer like this.
Probably right lol, edited to remove identifying information.
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These systems are MASSIVELY complicated and require quite a bit of technical know-how.
You named one main problem here.
The other ist cost. How much does a system cost that replaces one worker cost? INCLUDING the required technically skilled service staff?
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Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.
The system designers get tripped up by the strangest things. I once worked in a factory that uses copper bars of varying lengths, and the designer didn't expect the bars to 'sag' when picked up flatwise from the middle. So I can imagine picking up a bag of dog food would do that.
That's a bad engineer problem. Tasks must be reduced to absolute minimums, and operating scenarios must be maximized. Otherwise failure conditions will win.
They might have underestimated the mix of items. From bagged dog food with 20kg, boxes of all shapes down to small poly‘s is hard to handle. For picking robots as well as the sorting AGV‘s.
Amazon didn’t robotize its entire item spectrum yet, as far as I know. It focus on robotizable items.
If such a heavy dog food bag brakes, all the small pieces lie on the floor that those dumb AGV‘s drive upon. That’s immediately causing clogged wheels and even more. And to clean the mess up, one has to stop the entire AGV area as it’s not safe for humans to enter. One broken dog food bag can cause some expensive maintenance and drives operational costs up. 1 broken bag per month can likely kill your business case.
They just need robots that will clean up the dog food.
Yeah just throw a few roombas out there and they'd be good to go. 👍
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I mean anyone who's ever done anything with a long piece of lumber or piping or anything could predict that.
You can bet your tushy that whichever middle-manager came up with the idea of spending all that money to reduce reliance on human workers, has already picked up a hefty bonus, used a golden parachute, and is now scamming their way through another giant corporate to repeat the same shit with a different idiotic idea.
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814
https://retailboss.substack.com/p/krogers-350-million-lesson-why-big
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It's one of the great ironies of our time that we spend billions on slop machines but haven't yet been able to build a robot that can empty the dishwasher.
As a bachelor, a dishwasher is already a cabinet. It doesn't need emptying.
I've considered buying a second dishwasher so I can just swap between two self-cleaning cabinets.
So instead of hiring actual people again, they’ll look for cheaper engineers and robots.
Nah it's at least another decade of sunk cost management style then they will pivot back to humans once minimum wage has been repealed and the labor camps are in place
Robots are more expensive and are less capable than people? What a surprise! Not. I saw that coming years ago... 🙄
Especially at Walmart when loading a truck means throwing the shit inside and as fast as possible. Used to unload Walmart trucks. Wish had pics (this was wat before smartphones) You open back doors and the boxes would just spill out. There was always breakage. But Walmart didn't care. It fuck up way Walmart does business and they are shady as fuck. But allows them to not care about the products. But yeah robots are slow and no way can work at the speeds required at a Walmart distribution facility.
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Remember when the disclaimer "please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery" was practically ubiquitous on mail order packages? It's almost like that was a SANE way to run a logistics network!
We don't send pieces of paper back and forth with days long transit time to complete an order anymore.
Worked at a place that got obsessed with same or next day shipping. It was clearly killing employee morale and we weren’t selling anything that people needed that quickly. Make a special premium instant ship or something for the people having an emergency but not for everyone. The killer for me was that they were at times doing mandatory overtime during the week and then sending you home early on your required weekend shift so you could have the suck of getting your evenings and schedules killed but without the extra pay.
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So much of automation is trying to put robots in places humans were ment to be instead of designing processes that are for robots not people.
It's no wonder to me there is often issues
What's interesting is that this specific company isn't doing that.
They don't build robots to move around a human warehouse, they build a giant warehouse (sort of) designed for their robots.
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Link to the original article. Oh wait it's WSJ slop.
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