Wal Mart, the largest retailer in the United States, is building a distribution center with high-tech elements, hoping to deliver goods to customers faster and develop its online business. The company said on Friday that it plans to build four new distribution centers to use automation to more effectively package and deliver online orders. The first center will open in Illinois this summer. For customers, the new warehouse means that the next day or two delivery of commodities such as grain food and T-shirts will become more common.
The move comes as Wal Mart competes with online retail giant Amazon. Amazon makes it easy for customers with prime membership to order a variety of products and deliver them to their homes in about a day. In recent years, more and more sales of Wal Mart have come from its website. The company has 31 distribution centers dedicated to online orders. The company has more than 3500 stores (about 75% of the total stores) that are also accepting online orders.
But Michael prince, Wal Mart's vice president in charge of supply chain innovation and automation, said that in Wal Mart's existing distribution center, employees can walk more than nine miles a day to remove goods from shelves and drag them back to the packaging area.
There is no need to do this in the new warehouse. The automation system there will take out items from the expanded storage space, and then send them to an area. Employees will put them into a box. The box will be customized according to the size of the order. Wal Mart tested the concept at an fulfillment center in pedrick, New Jersey.
Wal Mart's first new distribution center will open in Juliette, Illinois, about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, and deliver goods to customers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. The company will also build three other distribution centers in Indiana, Texas and Pennsylvania.
Wal Mart said it would hire 4000 people in the new distribution center. The company said that the starting salary of the existing warehouse is $16 to $28 per hour, and the starting salary of the new warehouse will be at the high end of this range.