Amazon leads automation push as pressure on Walmart reaches fever pitch
The Wall Street Journal reported on October 9, 2026, that sorting merchandise — a task the paper described as “the seemingly simple task” — is among the many challenges of Walmart’s decade-long, multibillion-dollar quest to automate its warehouses. The reporting ran in the Journal’s “10-Point” newsletter, with the underlying story credited to reporter Sarah Nassauer.
The current scale of Walmart’s warehouse operation puts the challenge in perspective. Walmart relies on more than 140,000 warehouse workers to keep goods moving, the Journal reported. The work is physically demanding — a worker might log roughly 20,000 steps in a single shift, the paper wrote. And, on its face, the work is not complicated. “It also isn’t all that complicated,” the Journal observed — “unless you try to program robots to do it.”
Earlier robotic tests did not all pan out. Some early Walmart robotic tests either failed or proved too expensive, the Journal reported, creating a bottleneck as retailers scramble to speed up home delivery.
The competitive backdrop adds urgency. Rival Amazon is leading the automation push and has surpassed Walmart in annual revenue, the Journal wrote. The combined result, the paper reported, is that “the pressure to get warehouse robotics right has reached a fever pitch.”
Nassauer filed the report from what the Journal described as the front lines of the retailer’s automation efforts. The piece ran in “The 10-Point,” a daily newsletter curated and edited by Morgan Smith and Gary Mitchell in collaboration with Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.