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

Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts · Oct 11, 2026 · 5m · transcript

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…