Walmart Spent a Decade and Billions Teaching Robots to Empty a Cardboard Box. The Box Was an Inch and a Half Too Tall, the Power Bill Tripled, and the Dog Food Still Needs a Human
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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 cardboard box is too tall for the machines, Symbotic's robots stop for dust, robotic arms fumbled frozen turkeys before Thanksgiving, and electricity at automated grocery warehouses runs up to $800,000 a month against $250,000 when humans did the work. Walmart's supply-chain chief Rob Montgomery calls it 'peak complexity' and says the company will build anyway because waiting for perfect would take too long; executives say the 140,000 warehouse workers won't be laid off because turnover does the job for them.
