The international corporation, Walmart, has been a major beneficiary of the governmental lockdowns and draconian overreach. With a massive growth in sales from 2020, Walmart seeks to further expand its empire to rival Amazon.
In order to compete, Walmart will be greatly expanding their Local Fulfillment Centers (LCF) and making them much more autonomous in order to fulfill their influx of online orders.
Walmart’s SVP of Customer Support Tom Ward, explained this innovation on the company’s website.
From the post:
Our customers love the speed and convenience of pickup and delivery, and we’re committed to finding faster ways to serve them, which is why we’re scaling the number of stores that will also serve as local fulfillment centers. We’re already planning dozens of locations, with many more to come.
A local fulfillment center (LFC) is a compact, modular warehouse built within, or added to, a store. In addition to fresh and frozen items, LFCs can store thousands of the items we know customers want most, from consumables to electronics.
Instead of an associate walking the store to fulfill an order from our shelves, automated bots retrieve the items from within the fulfillment center. The items are then brought to a picking workstation, where the order can be assembled with speed.
We’ve always said personal shoppers are the secret to our pickup and delivery success, and that remains true. So, while the system retrieves the order for assembly, a personal shopper handpicks fresh items like produce, meat and seafood, and large general merchandise from the sales floor.
Once the order is collected, the system stores it until it’s ready for pickup. This whole process can take just a few minutes from the time the order is placed to the time it’s ready for a customer or delivery driver to collect.
We began piloting our first local fulfillment center in Salem, New Hampshire, in late 2019. The technology is impressive. Equally impressive are the results:
- More availability: We are able to pick more orders and do it quicker, creating more availability for customers.
- Faster fulfillment: The system’s speed can allow orders to be picked up or delivered within the hour.
- Greater efficiency: One local fulfillment center can fulfill orders for many stores, which means its benefits can be felt by customers in stores nearby.
We’ll be building local fulfillment centers with various technology partners, including Alert Innovation, Dematic and Fabric. With these partners, we’ll be testing different orientations and add-on innovations to understand what works best in different environments. For example, in some locations, we’ll be adding on to our stores. In others, the fulfillment centers will sit inside the existing store footprint.
Finally, in some stores, we’ll be adding automated pickup points. Think of it as the ultimate convenience that allows customers and delivery drivers to drive up, scan a code, grab their order and go!
It’s no secret our customers love the speed and convenience of pickup and delivery. These local fulfillment centers help unlock our ability to expand even faster to meet their needs today, while also setting a new foundation to serve them in the future. We’re excited about this new chapter for our business and what it means for our customers.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7
The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty.
Proverbs 10:15
As more and more large businesses and corporations put smaller businesses out of operation, those laid-off employees will be forced to work these corporations – only to then be replaced by a robot that is faster and more efficient, and does not have to be paid.
The vision for Agenda 2030 is to have the people serviced for them by robots: this certainly furthers that goal.
More cheap goods from China are on the way.
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