Doug’s Dime: Are #Robots Really Going To Take Over?

In Walmart’s perfect world, workers wouldn’t have to touch a product until it arrived at the store, perfectly organized on the pallet and ready to be placed directly on the shelf. But in the real world, the robots they’ve hired can’t lift the big bags of dog food. A new report from the Wall Street Journal shows the retailer has spent billions over the last decade attempting to fully automate its 200 US supply-chain buildings that feed 5,200 stores. Walmart is trying to catch up with Amazon, which dethroned the retailer as the biggest company globally by 2025 sales. Even with the progress it’s made retrofitting a supply chain made in the 1980s, there have been growing pains: In Walmart’s automated grocery facilities, electric bills can balloon to over $800,000 per month, compared to $250,000 per month for powering a manual warehouse. The robots used to move products around warehouses also break a lot. About 5% of bots are being fixed at any given time, down from 10% last year, accordin