It’s a bit of a dog-bites-man story, but the Wall Street Journal has a piece about the push in warehouses to bring more robots in.
“Labor costs are high, labor availability is low, and when you couple that with the competitive threats of companies like Amazon and Walmart investing significantly, you’re left with almost no other alternative,” Scriven said.
Retailers Amazon.com and Walmart have each invested heavily to automate and speed up more of their fulfillment processes to get online orders to customers as fast as possible. Companies have said faster fulfillment speeds help drive increased sales.
Warehouse wages have risen sharply over the past decade, in part fueled by red-hot demand for workers during the pandemic. The average hourly wage for a U.S. warehouse worker rose to $26.85 in June, up about 5% from 2025 and 41% from 10 years earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is really a policy effect of a tighter labor market. The president can’t control this, but as our editorial today points out, the president can stop a massive flow of illegal immigrants into the country. Much of the fear of imminent recession over the past year was driven by the lower numbers of jobs created. But this lower number was compatible with a low unemployment figure precisely because the country wasn’t absorbing hundreds of thousands of working-age people a month as it did under Joe Biden.
The uncertainty and higher costs brought by tariffs are not the only thing driving investment in build-out in America and in a now growing industrial sector; it is also the reliably lower energy costs here compared to other global locations. This surge of investment and this innovation is good thing.