Walmart banks on stores, robots as it stokes e-commerce

Retail Dive

The retail giant expects that within three years, 55% of its fulfillment center volume will move through automated facilities, and a whopping 65% of its stores will be automated to some extent.

Walmart on Tuesday had offered a tour of a fully automated facility in Brooksville, Florida, and Telsey Advisory Group analysts led by Joseph Feldman said they were “impressed by the high level of automation.” Two robots handled an inbound shipment of some 3,400 packages; sensors and robots separated them before they moved to an automated grid. Meanwhile robots were able to build pallets of 130 cases, versus 75 for manually built ones, per Telsey’s note, which also described robots in storage and picking, and autonomous forklifts that loaded and unloaded.

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