BENTONVILLE, Ark. and SAN DIEGO, Ca.--Sam's Club has completed a roll out of inventory scanning towers that have been added to its existing fleet of floor scrubbing robots. The club store had started adding the inventory towers to its robots in January, and now all locations have the technology added. "Our initial goal at Sam's Club was to convert time historically spent on scrubbers to more member-focused activities. Our autonomous scrubbers have exceeded this goal. In addition to increasing the consistency and frequency of floor cleaning, intelligent scrubbers have empowered associates with critical insights," said Todd Garner, vice president, in-club product management.

Walmart has revealed it is using fully driverless trucks to bring groceries from a fulfillment center to one of its Arkansas supermarkets, in a move that will cut costs and address the ongoing labor shortage affecting retail supply chains. Twelve hours a day, apair of trucks are running on a seven-mile loop of public roads from a fulfillment center to the Walmart on Regional Airport Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the mega-retailer is headquartered. From there customers can conveniently pick up their orders. Walmart started driverless deliveries in August using autonomous trucks from Palo Alto, California-based start-up Gatik, but waited to make the announcement until Monday, after two months of incident-free deliveries. The trucking industry has faced a record worker shortage since the pandemic started, Chris Spear, president of the American Trucking Associations, told CNN, with 80,000 drivers still needed.

Walmart said Monday it has started using fully driverless trucking in its online grocery business, aiming to increase capacity and reduce inefficiencies. Walmart and Silicon Valley start-up Gatik said that, since August, they've operated two autonomous box trucks -- without a safety driver -- on a 7-mile loop daily for 12 hours. The Gatik trucks are loaded with online grocery orders from a Walmart fulfillment center called a "dark store." The orders are then taken to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered. The program began in December 2020 after getting approval from the Arkansas State Highway Commission.

As promised, Walmart has started doing fully driverless box truck deliveries in partnership with startup Gatik between its own locations on a fixed 7-mile loop, the companies announced. Despite those limitations, the route in Bentonville, Arkansas involves "intersections, traffic lights and merging on dense urban roads," the companies said. It's another shot of good news for the progress of self-driving vehicles after GM's cruise launched its self-driving taxis into testing last week. The Gatik trucks are bringing grocery orders from a Walmart fulfilment center (dark store) to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, the host city of the company's headquarters. The route covers the "middle mile" transportation of goods between warehouses and stores. The program effectively got launched following the December 2020 approval by the Arkansas State Highway Commission, and has been driverless since this summer.

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Walmart said Tuesday it will start farming out its delivery service, using contract workers, autonomous vehicles and other means to transport rival retailers' products directly to their customers' homes as fast as just a few hours. The nation's largest retailer said it will dispatch contract workers from its Spark delivery network, which was launched in 2018, to merchants' stores to pick up items and then bring them to shoppers. Over the past year, Walmart has doubled Spark's coverage to more than 500 cities nationwide, providing access to more than 20 million households. Walmart, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., aims to tap into its ties with local communities, particularly businesses in rural areas that have struggled to provide their own delivery services. The strategy will pit Walmart against delivery services run by the likes of Uber and DoorDash. And it comes as Walmart moves to expand its sources of profits and revenues beyond its core retail businesses.

In 2019, Walmart started working with a company called Gatik to test autonomous delivery trucks on a two-mile route between a fulfillment center and a store in Bentonville, Arkansas. After those vehicles logged more than 70,000 miles with a human driver there to make sure nothing went wrong, Walmart and Gatik say they're ready for a new challenge. Next year, there won't be any human drivers in the trucks. That milestone will make Gatik one of the first companies in the space to operate a fully autonomous route in this way. As the startup itself is quick to point, it has its simplified approach to thank for the achievement.

Starting next year, certain Walmart orders will literally fly to your door. The retailer announced a trial run with medical supply drone delivery company Zipline early Monday. Only medical and health and wellness products from Walmart will be part of the pilot program and it'll only be in Northwest Arkansas in early 2021. The drones will cover a 50-mile radius around Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. They can haul up to four pounds of cargo and fly up to 80 mph.

A group of anonymous Walmart workers have raised concerns about the anti-shoplifting technology used to monitor the company's self-checkout kiosks. A group that calls themselves'Concerned Home Office Associates' has circulated a video documenting the system's flaws, including frequent failures to identify unscanned items, and incorrectly identifying personal items potentially shoplifted. In an email sent to company management at Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, the group claims to be'past their breaking point,' saying the system's frequent false positives are irritating customers and putting workers at greater risk of COVID-19 exposure by unnecessarily having to verify customer's purchases at unsafe distances. An anonymous group of Walmart employees have raised concerns about anti-theft technology used at self-checkout kiosks, saying it's'a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard' 'It's like a noisy tech, a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard,' one of the Walmart employees, who asked to remain anonymous, told Wired. The system was originally designed by Everseen--an artificial intelligence and technology firm based in Cork, Ireland--and relies on overhead cameras, or'digital eyes,' that film customers as they scan objects into the register.

This week Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got the tech sector's attention with emerging reports of his "fascination" with the rapidly developing world of autonomous autos. "If you think about the auto industry right now, there's so many things going on with Uber-ization, electrification, the connected car -- so it's a fascinating industry," Bezos said. "It's going to be something very interesting to watch and participate in, and I'm very excited about that whole industry." Amazon has made some sizable investments to accompany that interest -- most notably in automation and electrification start-up Rivian and self-driving startup Aurora. And fascination aside, Amazon has a race for the consumer's whole paycheck to vie in with Walmart -- and there is little doubt that auto automation plays like Rivian and Aurora could put some octane, so to speak, behind that effort.