At Walmart, small warehouse robots can't get dog food bags out of their boxes

According to the Wall Street Journal, the robots still cannot take the biggest and heaviest items out of boxes, such as bags of dog food. They also break down often.

The newspaper says even a simple task, taking an item out of a box to pack it for the customer, is proving very hard to automate.

Executives say automation will reduce the number of warehouse handlers, and that many of them would move into managing and repairing the robots. But according to WSJ sources at Walmart, the cost of the mechanical and electrical engineers needed in automated warehouses exceeds the payroll of unskilled handlers.

Amazon is also automating its warehouses on a large scale. Rueben Scriven, of the firm Interact Analysis, tells the WSJ of an “arms race” between retailers.