Walmart's 90 Million Sensor Bet: Tracking the Future of Retail | Fast Five Shorts

Walmart plans to deploy 90 million.

90 million.

Wow, that's a lot of.

That's a lot of millions.

90 million Bluetooth sensors across its inventory by the end of next year in a massive rollout of supply chain management technology made possible via partnership with tech firm Wiliot, according to Supermarket News.

It is the first large scale deployment of ambient Internet of things technology in retail.

San Diego based Williot said last week the sensors, known as pixels, work like having a GPS tracker on every item and are, quote, designed to dramatically enhance supply chain efficiency, inventory accuracy and also cold chain compliance.

Yes, everyone's favorite three words.

The technology is currently being used at 500 Walmart locations with plans to expand in 2026.

The full rollout will cover 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, neighborhood markets and more than 40 distribution centers as well.

And what's your take on Bluetooth item tracking?

We've never talked about this very much.

I think this is really important because we've had Wiliot on the show in the past.

We're going to be having them back to talk about this deployment here in a couple of weeks.

But I think this is another example for why you cannot be a one and done researcher of this technology.

Because clearly these tags have reached mass scale now that Walmart is deploying them the way that they are.

There has to be a cost advantage and there has to be an operational advantage for Walmart to invest this heavily in the technology.

And I think that other grocers should be looking at this too.

They are able to know exactly where inventory is, what the temperature of that inventory has been like.

I love the example of the structure strawberries like these.

These tags are put on the strawberries in the field, on the pallets and then you know, as the grocery retailer with a very high degree of certainty that those strawberries were kept at temp and are going to be.

The whole pallet is going to be saleable once you get them to your store versus they hit, you know, cold weather when they were traveling along the way and you should, you know, expect 20% spoilage or something like that.

And I think in an age where we're going to start to see consumers, you know, using tools like ChatGPT to say I'm making this recipe, I need strawberry shortcake and you get to, or I'm making strawberry shortcake, I need strawberries for that recipe.

I need all these things and you get to, okay, one click checkout to Walmart.

Well, if Walmart doesn't have the strawberries, I'm Shifting my whole order to another place because I don't have, they don't have visibility into whether or not they can fulfill that order.

And I think that is going to be so important as we think about the future and really having a crystal clear view on your inventory in your store so that you can know that your customer is going to come to you and they're going to get exactly what they're expecting to pick up for their grocery trip and they can rely on you time and time again.

And that I think is where the real beauty of this comes into play with these tags and why they're, they're now worth the investment when inventory visibility is such a huge, huge priority for almost every retailer that we've been talking to lately.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I mean, I agree.

Yeah.

I mean we remember last week on the lightning round we talked about pasta salads and the listeria outbreak.

Yeah.

I mean essentially this helps prevent that or at least gives you the tracking to understand when and where that might have happened in your supply chain.

So I joked about cold chain cold storage compliance, but you know, it's, it's very real and very, very important and actually people's lives are at stake too.

So I applaud Walmart for doing this.

Walmart again out on the front of everything.

You know, expanding ESLs to all stores, expanding Bluetooth tracking to all stores and the reasons I like it.

And I'm just going to keep saying it, I think it's going to be my new mantra.

I got to come up with a way to actually say it as a mantra, but you're going to hear me say it over and over again.

I'm all in on technology deployments that solve operational problems.

And the operational problem here that you just mentioned is inventory accuracy at the store level.

And that also have a minimal impact on the actual day to day operations of what you're asking your store associates to do.

The tags go onto the products themselves, the store.

You know, from my understanding, I don't this, the store team shouldn't have to do much.

So as long as the background operating system to collect the data is working and there's probably some minimal training involved at the store level.

Minimal.

As long as that's done well and smartly, this will pay off in the long run from an operational productivity and efficiency standpoint.

Yeah.

And like Greg Cathy was quoted who's been on the show too, he, he said, you know, they've never been able to have this visibility into products and what the, the entire chain has been from the time that they get them from their suppliers into each of the stores and where they're going.

And to even be able to reroute last minute if they need to.

Like all of this is information that they've never had before.

And I think you're right.

Once the store associates figure out how to work that data, they'll be able to, you know, everything in their operations has improved because of it.

Yeah.

And especially in food and, you know, metal based objects, where RFID is a little more tricky to figure out.