Walmart opened its fifth next-generation fulfillment center on Thursday — a 900,000-square-foot, highly automated facility in Stockton, California — on the same day a Wall Street Journal report documented mounting failures in the retailer's warehouse robotics program, including oversized cardboard boxes that jam automated machines and self-driving transport robots that break down too often.

"Problems have multiplied," the WSJ reported Friday, in one of the most detailed accounts yet of the operational friction inside the largest private warehouse workforce in the United States — more than 140,000 workers whom Walmart ultimately aims to reduce through automation.

The juxtaposition is stark. Walmart is scaling its automated DC network — Stockton follows facilities in Indiana, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois, with a sixth, 1.5-million-square-foot site planned for Carnesville, Georgia — while the economics of the automation itself remain under strain.

What do the reported failures cost?

The WSJ report quantifies the cost pressure in concrete terms. Electricity at an automated grocery facility can run as much as $800,000 per month, roughly triple the approximately $250,000 Walmart paid before automation. Engineers needed to maintain the robotic equipment also cost more than the warehouse workers the systems are meant to replace.

Those figures matter for any distributor watching Walmart's automation playbook as a benchmark. The capital and operating cost curve of high-throughput automated DCs is steeper than vendors' pitches suggest, and the payback depends on volumes that only the largest scale operators can reliably generate.

The retrofit problem compounds the cost. Walmart is often installing robotic systems into existing warehouses, many built in the 1980s and 1990s — buildings designed for a different era of materials handling. The company also runs a wide variety of robotic systems from multiple vendors for different tasks at different locations, according to the report, which fragments integration and maintenance.

A Walmart spokesperson could not be reached for comment on the report.

Why did the $1 billion store-fulfillment effort stall?

The report also details Walmart's struggle to automate ecommerce fulfillment from its stores. The retailer has invested nearly $1 billion in the effort since 2016. Along the way, it bought and then sold the technology partner handling the project, Alert Innovation — offloading it in 2023 to robotics provider Symbotic, which itself counts Walmart as a major customer and shareholder.

The prior system was rolled out in 20 stores and proved too inefficient, the report says. Walmart is now testing a new version of the system at a store in Dallas. On a recent earnings call, Symbotic said it expects the new SymMicro ecommerce system to be running in about six months, after which it could expand to additional Walmart locations.

That timeline is a vendor projection, not a measured deployment — SymMicro's performance in a single Dallas store remains untested at scale, and the 20-store predecessor failed on efficiency grounds after a full rollout decision.

What does Stockton add to the network?

Walmart said the Stockton facility will help it handle more customer orders and strengthen store-distribution capabilities in the Western U.S. The site will create more than 1,000 jobs — a reminder that even "highly automated" next-gen DCs remain large employers, even as the company's long-term goal is reduced warehouse labor.

The next-generation facilities range from 871,000 to 2.2 million square feet. Walmart says their networks of robotic devices and conveyor belts cut order fulfillment to a five-step process from the 12 steps previously required — a claimed 58% reduction in handling steps that, if sustained at volume, would directly improve inventory turns and unit economics on ecommerce orders.

What is the takeaway for distributors?

Walmart's experience is a caution against treating automation as a margin quick fix. Three costs are running against the labor savings: retrofitting older buildings, higher-skilled and higher-paid engineering labor, and power bills that can triple. Vendor heterogeneity — multiple robotics suppliers across the network — adds integration risk that only disciplined standardization can contain.

Symbotic's SymMicro timeline gives the industry a concrete checkpoint: if the system is running in roughly six months and expands beyond Dallas, Walmart's store-based ecommerce model gets another chance after the $1 billion, 20-store failure. If it stalls again, expect more pressure on the vendor consolidation side of the equation.