Walmart Invests In Local Fulfillment

Supply Chain
Written By Rick Watson

Walmart announced that it’s scaling its local fulfillment efforts. The industry term of art is MFCs or micro-fulfillment centers.

It fits into two broad trends:

  1. Getting inventory closer to the consumer.

  2. The continuing consumer uptake of local pickup and delivery efforts.

The alternative for Walmart is continuing to pick from retail shelves. which is much less efficient. This is one of the things where Amazon's efforts have been mixed in Whole Foods.

Human pickers seriously disrupt other retail shoppers in the store. And while Amazon has tested a Whole Foods dark store in Brooklyn, it's not clear they are prepared to invest in their store infrastructure to upgrade them all to use this type of concept.

This is one area where traditional players may have an advantage over Amazon in the grocery category if they make the right investments.

Rick Watson

Rick Watson founded RMW Commerce Consulting after spending 20+ years as a technology entrepreneur and operator exclusively in the eCommerce industry with companies like ChannelAdvisor, BarnesandNoble.com, Merchantry, and Pitney Bowes.

Watson’s work today is centered on supporting investors and management teams incubating and growing direct-to-consumer businesses. Most recently, in partnership with WHP Global, Rick was a critical resource in architecting the WHP+ platform, a new turnkey direct to consumer digital e-commerce platform that powers AnneKlein.com and JosephAbboud.com.

Watson also hosts a weekly podcast, Watson Weekly, where he shares an unbiased, unfiltered expert take on the retail sector’s biggest players.

In the past year alone, Rick has spoken at many in-person and virtual events as well as podcasts on topics ranging from retail/ecom to supply chain/logistics and even digital grocery including CommerceNext IRL, ASCM Connect, and Retail Innovation Conference.

https://www.rmwcommerce.com/
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