The discounter has opened a high-tech market fulfilment centre (MFC), at store 100 in its hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas.
It’s the second nationwide, with the first being a proof of concept located in Salem, New Hampshire, Walmart plans to continue opening MFCs in select stores in the coming years.
The expansion of the MFC concept is in line with the retailer’s strategic move toward expanding the use of its stores as fulfilment centres to enhance the shopping experience for customers everywhere.
The centre is built within the store and is powered by a proprietary storage and retrieval system named Alphabot. Walmart acquired Alphabot creator Alert Innovation, a robotics automation company that develops material-handling technology for automating order fulfilment in retail supply chains, in October 2022. Walmart had been working with Alert to customise technology for its MFCs since 2016.
Walmart believes fulfilment through digitisation and connecting its store and supply chain assets end-to-end will transform fulfilment and result in improved customer satisfaction and associate opportunity.
