Week 36 - Warehouses Bet Big on Robots and Workers: Amazon's Holiday Fee Squeeze, Anthropic's $30 Trillion Bet, and Retail's Efficiency Race

MaxWelcome to The Checkout Point, your quick dive into this week's eCommerce buzz with me, Alex, powered by PYMNTS. These 20 minutes pack the latest trends, news, and insights. Let's navigate the digital marketplace together. Ready? Let's go.

RachelOkay. Okay, so picture this. A warehouse is buying 100 new robots this month.

Speaker 3Sure.

RachelAnd also hiring, like, a wave of new warehouse workers. Same building, same month.

Speaker 3Wait, that doesn't add up. Robots come in, people go, right? That's the whole story we've been told for years.

RachelThat's what I thought, but apparently not.

Speaker 3Huh.

RachelI'm Max, and this is The Checkout Point, your weekly download on eCommerce, retail, and everything moving product from a warehouse to your front door.

Speaker 3And I'm Rachel. Today feels like one of those weeks where the headline numbers and the actual operations tell two totally different stories.

RachelTotally, and it's not just the robots thing.

Speaker 3No?

RachelWe've got Amazon squeezing sellers right before the holidays.

Speaker 3Oh, sellers love that.

RachelRight. And then, this one's wild, there's an AI company throwing around a revenue number so big it barely makes sense as a real forecast.

Speaker 3Okay, how big are we talking?

RachelLet's just say if you run a spreadsheet for a living, this number will genuinely break your brain a little bit, maybe twice.

Speaker 3Okay, now I really, really wanna know.

RachelI'm not saying it yet. You gotta stick around.

Speaker 3Come on, you can't just dangle that.

RachelI can, actually. That's my job.

Speaker 3Fine, fine. But warehouses first?

RachelWarehouses first because this robots and hiring thing genuinely messed with my head when I read into it.

Speaker 3I'm bracing myself.

RachelYou should be. It's not the simple automation kills jobs story everyone assumes.

Speaker 3So what is it?

RachelThat's exactly where we're starting.

Speaker 3Alright, let's get into the warehouses.

RachelOkay, so warehouses buying robots and hiring more people at the exact same time, that's the flip nobody saw coming.

Speaker 3Right, because the story we've all heard for years is robots come in, headcount goes down. That's basically the whole pitch reporters give it.

RachelExactly, and PYMNTS actually called that out directly. They said the warehouse robot story has mostly been told as a replacement story, machines taking over jobs people used to do.

Speaker 3And the numbers this year don't match that anymore.

RachelThey don't. Warehouses are buying the robots and hiring their human headcount in the same breath.

Speaker 3That's kind of wild when you sit with it for a second. Usually, it's one or the other.

RachelRight? It's not either robots or people, it's both at once.

Speaker 3Okay, but why would that even financially make sense? You'd think if the robot's doing the job, you cut the person doing it.

RachelSo what I think is going on is when demand is surging the way it has been, robots handle the repetitive stuff, sorting, moving pallets around, but you still need people for the harder stuff to automate, weird-shaped items, quality checks, sorting out exceptions.

Speaker 3So it's additive, not a swap.

RachelAdditive, yeah. You're scaling both because you need the raw capacity, not because one's replacing the other.

Speaker 3I mean, from an ops standpoint, that tracks with what I saw at Amazon. The busiest distribution centers never had extra slack lying around. Volume goes up, everything goes up with it. Machines, people, forklifts, all of it moves together.

RachelRight. Right.

Speaker 3But here's my question. Is that actually sustainable, or is this just a peak demand thing where hiring both looks smart right up until growth slows?

RachelThat's fair.

Speaker 3Because if volume flattens next year, one of those two lines is getting cut, and I don't think it's the robots.

RachelYeah, the robots don't file for unemployment.

Speaker 3Exactly. So I don't buy this as some new permanent model. I think it's what surging demand looks like right before somebody has to make a choice.

RachelWhich, fair, we genuinely don't know yet, but right now it's breaking the simple story everybody had in their head about automation just wiping out headcount.

Speaker 3Totally.

RachelAnd it makes me wonder how many of these warehouses are actually planning for that slowdown or just riding the wave until it stops.

Speaker 3My guess, riding the wave. Nobody budgets for the peak to end until it already has.

RachelThat is deeply pessimistic and also probably true.

Speaker 3I worked retail ops. I'm allowed to be pessimistic.

RachelFair enough.

Speaker 3But it does put a real question mark on whether this is a trend or just a snapshot of one really busy year.

RachelIt also makes me think about what this actually looks like for the person getting hired right now. If you're one of the new warehouse hires this year, are you working next to a robot or basically training your own replacement without knowing it?

Speaker 3Probably a bit of both, honestly. In my experience, the roles that get added alongside automation are usually the ones a robot can't do cleanly. Exception handling, quality checks, packing oddly shaped stuff. Those aren't throwaway jobs, but they're also not quite the same job that existed five years ago. That's the nuance that gets lost.

RachelSo even the jobs that are growing are kind of changing shape underneath people.

Speaker 3Right, and that's a harder story to tell in a headline than robots took the jobs or robots didn't take the jobs. The real answer is the job itself is turning into something different.

RachelWhich is a much less satisfying headline than robots took the jobs.

Speaker 3Massively less satisfying, but probably closer to the truth, honestly.

RachelRight. And either way, it's not the tidy robots take jobs headline people wanted.

Speaker 3Nope.

RachelSpeaking of businesses trying to scale without wrecking their cost structure.

Speaker 3Oh, I know where this is going.

RachelAmazon just did something to holiday shipping deadlines that every retailer leaning on their platform needs to know about.

Speaker 3Yeah, this one's got real consequences for sellers, not just a headline.

RachelIt really does. So Amazon just dropped the holiday fulfillment numbers for twenty twenty-six, and Rachel, it's not great.

Speaker 3Hit me.

RachelAverage peak fee lands around thirty-two cents a unit, runs October 15th through January 14th.

Speaker 3Thirty-two cents doesn't sound like much

RachelUntil you're moving 100,000 units, and that's an extra thirty-two grand just sitting on top of everything else.

Speaker 3Right. And it's stacking on the fuel surcharge, not replacing it.

RachelExactly. Three and a half percent fuel surcharge, still there, still adding up.

Speaker 3Wait, is that fuel surcharge even temporary anymore? Because fuel prices move, that fee doesn't seem to.

RachelThat's the thing. The company says it's staying in place until further notice. No sunset date, nothing.

Speaker 3"Until further notice" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

RachelRight? It's like saying, "We'll let you know," and then just never letting you know.

Speaker 3So sellers are eating two fees now permanently with no end date on either?

RachelBasically, and it gets tighter on the other end too.

Speaker 3Meaning what?

RachelMeaning the inbound deadlines. Sourcing Journal broke down the 2026 cutoffs for Prime Big Deal Days and Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Speaker 3And?

RachelCompressed. The AWD windows, the minimal split windows, the optimized split windows, all of them are landing weeks earlier than last year.

Speaker 3Weeks earlier is a lot when you're already racing a boat from overseas.

RachelThat's exactly the problem. If your inventory plan was built around 2025 timing, you're already behind.

Speaker 3Okay, but from an ops standpoint, why would Amazon compress the window and raise the fee at the same time? That feels like punishing the same seller twice.

RachelI don't think it's punishment. I think it's Amazon protecting its own network. They'd rather have inventory sitting early than get slammed in December and blow their own promise dates.

Speaker 3Sure, but the seller's the one holding the bag on both ends: earlier cash outlay for inventory and a bigger fee once it actually moves.

RachelRight. And that's cash you don't get back until the item actually moves off the shelf.

Speaker 3Which, if you're a small brand, is a real working capital problem. You can't just casually eat two extra weeks of holding cost.

RachelNo, and here's the part that gets me. A lot of sellers I talk to are still planning like it's 2025. Same calendar, same buffer.

Speaker 3That's a mistake waiting to happen.

RachelAnd it's not just the big brands either. Small sellers usually don't have a whole logistics team watching cutoff calendars all year long, so this stuff sneaks up on them.

Speaker 3Right. A small brand might not even know the optimized split window moved until they try to book a slot, and it's already gone.

RachelThen they're stuck shipping standard freight in December at a way worse rate on top of the fee we already talked about.

Speaker 3Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to save money by planning early.

RachelSo this isn't really about the fee itself being outrageous. It's about the calendar making everything harder to control.

Speaker 3Yeah. Flat fees you can budget for. A moving deadline you can only budget for if you actually know it moved.

RachelFor real. If you're listening and you sell on Amazon, go check your AWD dates right now. Like, pause this and go look.

Speaker 3Mid-podcast homework, I love it.

RachelHey, better a homework assignment than a stock out in December.

Speaker 3Fair. So bottom line, flat fees on paper, but the real cost is showing up earlier, and it's showing up twice.

RachelMove now, not later. That's the whole message from Amazon this year.

Speaker 3It's the same efficiency squeeze we were just talking about with Warehouses, just wearing a different hat.

RachelTotally. Everybody's fighting the same clock.

Speaker 3Speaking of numbers that make you sit up, Max, before you move on, I feel like we need a palate cleanser from Amazon fees.

RachelOh, funny you say that. Before I forget, speaking of eye-popping numbers, wait until you hear what Anthropic just told investors about future revenue.

Speaker 3Okay, now I'm listening.

RachelThirty trillion with a T.

Speaker 3I'm sorry, what?

RachelOkay, so remember I said hold on to your hats for this Anthropic number?

Speaker 3Yeah. You've been sitting on this for, like, ten minutes.

RachelI have. I have. So the Wall Street Journal is reporting Anthropic is getting ready to tell investors it's expecting more than $30 trillion in potential revenue.

Speaker 3Wait. Trillion with a T?

RachelTrillion. Thirty trillion.

Speaker 3That's not a company forecast. That's a national GDP.

RachelRight? That's basically the entire US economy in one AI company's investor deck.

Speaker 3Okay, so who actually believes that number?

RachelI mean, somebody at Anthropic wrote it down, and somebody's about to pitch it to investors, so.

Speaker 3Sure, but a number that big isn't really a plan. It's a headline. It's designed to get people talking, not to get modeled out in a spreadsheet.

RachelYou think it's just for buzz?

Speaker 3I think it's when a projection is that far out from anything a company has ever made, it stops being guidance and starts being marketing. Nobody at Amazon is forecasting Thirty trillion in fulfillment fees.

RachelNo, they're forecasting thirty-two cents at a time, apparently.

Speaker 3Exactly, and that's the difference. One of those numbers you can actually build a warehouse budget around. The other one you put on a slide to get the next funding round excited.

RachelOkay, but to be fair, AI revenue could genuinely explode. Like, the technology's moving fast.

Speaker 3It could. I'm not saying the growth isn't real. I'm saying there's a huge gap between a number that sounds good in a pitch deck and a number that actually shows up on a balance sheet a few years from now.

RachelSo is thirty trillion a meaningful planning number, or is it just a number that makes headlines?

Speaker 3Honestly, I think it's mostly the second thing. When a company throws out a projection that's bigger than the GDP of most countries, that's not a planning number anymore. That's a North Star for a fundraising conversation.

RachelBut investors still write checks based on stuff like this.

Speaker 3They do, and that's the part that actually worries me a little. Because once one company puts a number like Thirty Trillion out there, everybody adjacent to them starts pricing their own growth story against it. Doesn't matter if the number's real.

RachelRight. It resets what big even means.

Speaker 3Exactly. And we're seeing that same energy everywhere right now, not just with Anthropic.

RachelYeah. This is the AI investment mania thing.

Speaker 3Totally. AI infrastructure spending, AI features bolted onto retail platforms, chip makers, cloud providers, all of it getting priced like the growth curve only goes up forever.

RachelAnd retailers are doing their version of that hype too. Feels like every earnings call this year has an AI slide in it now.

Speaker 3Every single one. Doesn't matter what the company actually sells.

RachelSo how do you tell the difference between the real thing and the slide?

Speaker 3You go back to fundamentals. Robots and hiring jobs both climbing, that's an actual operational number you can go verify. Amazon's fee schedule is printed. It starts October fifteenth whether anyone likes it or not.

RachelBut thirty trillion is just asserted.

Speaker 3Right. Nobody's shown their work on that number publicly, at least not that I've seen, and honestly, that's the whole tension running under this episode if you think about it.

RachelHow so?

Speaker 3Every story today has a version of the same question underneath. Is the growth real, or is it just the story that sounds best on a call?

RachelThe robots and hiring thing turned out to actually be real, verifiable in the data. Right. That one held up. The Amazon fees, also real, also verifiable. Sellers are gonna feel it whether they like the story or not.

Speaker 3Right. And the thirty trillion number just kind of sits there unproven until it isn't.

RachelExactly. It might turn out to be directionally right. AI could genuinely be that big someday, but could be, and here's our number, are two very different sentences, and Anthropic said the second one this week.

Speaker 3I mean, if it were even close to true, what would that actually look like? Thirty trillion is bigger than most estimates of global retail spending combined.

RachelRight. That's the scale we're talking about. It's not big software company. It's reshapes the entire global economy territory.

Speaker 3Which is exactly why it makes a great headline and a terrible modeling assumption.

RachelYeah. Spreadsheets don't really know what to do with reshapes the entire global economy as an input.

Speaker 3So I guess the takeaway is big growth stories deserve the same scrutiny whether they're wearing a robot costume or an AI costume.

RachelThat's basically it. Question the number, then go look at what's actually happening on the ground. So anyway, big growth stories with hidden catches aren't just an AI thing this week. They're kind of everywhere in retail right now.

Speaker 3Let's go look at retail then.

RachelOkay, so speaking of squeezes, BJ's Wholesale Club just announced they're cutting their SKU count.

Speaker 3By how much?

RachelTwenty percent. They wanna get down to somewhere around six thousand, sixty-five hundred items total.

Speaker 3Wait, that's a warehouse club. Isn't the whole point of going there that you leave with a giant vat of mayonnaise and forty other things you didn't know you needed?

RachelRight. That's the vibe, but apparently even they think there's too much clutter on the shelves.

Speaker 3I mean, from an ops standpoint, that tracks. Every SKU you carry costs you money whether it sells or not: storage, handling, forecasting, all of it.

RachelSupply Chain Dive pointed out BJ's actually tried a cut like this before.

Speaker 3And it didn't stick?

RachelDoesn't sound like it, which tells you how hard it is to walk away from an SKU once it's baked into your planograms.

Speaker 3Yeah, because the second you cut something, some regular customer is furious you dropped their one specific brand of pickles.

RachelExactly. But if they actually pull this off, that's a real leaner operation.

Speaker 3And there's a real cost to keeping it messy too. Every SKU sitting on a shelf ties up cash, warehouse space, forecasting time. It's not free just because it's sitting there.

RachelRight. It's basically dead weight if nobody's buying it consistently.

Speaker 3Exactly. So cutting a fifth of your assortment, if they actually stick to it this time, that's real money freed up.

RachelSpeaking of retailers making moves, Walmart's doing the opposite thing this week.

Speaker 3Oh?

RachelNew private label brand called Scenario, boho style, and it's launching in every single store across five departments.

Speaker 3Five departments in every store all at once? That's not a toe in the water. That's a full jump before you know if boho sells in Ohio the same way it sells in California.

RachelWell, sure, but that's kinda the point of owning your own brand. You're not paying a wholesale markup to some other label while you find out.

Speaker 3Fair. Still a lot of inventory risk sitting on Walmart's books if it doesn't land.

RachelSo while BJ's is trimming, Walmart's expanding. But here's the thing, private label isn't really about carrying more stuff. It's about owning the margin on the stuff you already sell.

Speaker 3Right. You're not adding complexity for the sake of variety. You're swapping out brands you don't control for one you do.

RachelAnd Walmart controls all of it, design, sourcing, pricing. No middleman brand taking a cut.

Speaker 3So it's actually the same efficiency instinct, just coming at it from a different angle.

RachelYeah. Fewer dependencies either way.

Speaker 3Now, on the flip side, not everyone's finding their angle. Foot Locker and Dick's Sporting Goods both had a rough quarter.

RachelHow rough?

Speaker 3Losses and a gloomy outlook from both.

RachelWhat's driving it?

Speaker 3Retail Dive's reporting points to fewer new sneaker launches and shifting demand in athletic footwear, and Foot Locker leans hard on malls.

RachelRight, and mall traffic is its own problem. If the sneaker drops dry up, there's less reason to even make the trip.

Speaker 3And it's a tough spot for a retailer to fix quickly too. You can't just manufacture more hype for a shoe drop out of thin air.

RachelYeah. That's not a lever you can pull in just a single quarter.

Speaker 3Exactly. And right now, the pipeline's just quiet.

RachelWhich stings more when your whole store format depends on foot traffic from people chasing a release.

Speaker 3It's a bottleneck problem, really. The whole footwear pipeline depends on constant new releases to get people walking through the door. And when that pipeline slows, everything downstream feels it, foot traffic, basket size, all of it.

RachelAnd that's across both of them. Dick's isn't immune either. This is showing up in the whole athletic footwear space, not just one banner.

Speaker 3So you've got BJ's cutting inventory, Walmart betting on private label, and Foot Locker just trying to survive a slow sneaker cycle.

RachelWildly different problems on paper, but zoom out, it's the same fight everywhere. Run leaner, move faster, or get squeezed.

Speaker 3The warehouse crews hiring robots and people at once, Amazon jamming sellers on fees and deadlines, now this. It's the whole industry doing the same math.

RachelEvery single one of them is trying to answer the same question. Do more with less one way or another. Big chain, small chain, doesn't matter.

Speaker 3Different companies, same underlying math everywhere you look.

RachelYeah. Let's wrap things up.

Speaker 3Okay, so if you're skimming this week and only remember one thing, check your own deadlines. Not Amazon's calendar, yours.

RachelRight.

Speaker 3Because every story today was really the same test. Robots and hiring both climbing, fees stacking up, SKUs getting cut. It's all somebody asking, "Does this actually pay off, or does it just sound good in a press release?"

RachelThe Thirty Trillion number included.

Speaker 3Especially that one. Big numbers are easy to print. Margins are hard to hit. So before you get excited about a headline growth number, ask what it costs to get there and who's actually paying it.

RachelLove that. Very on brand for you.

Speaker 3I contain multitudes.

RachelOkay, but here's my takeaway, and it's way less serious. If a Warehouse can hire more humans while also buying more Robots, I feel like I can justify buying a second monitor for my home office. Efficiency, baby.

Speaker 3That's not the same thing at all.

RachelIt's the same energy.

Speaker 3Sure. Sure, Max.

RachelHey, don't knock it till you've felt the productivity boost of a second monitor.

Speaker 3I'll take your word for it, some other week when I've got the budget for it.

RachelAnyway, if you like this one, hit Subscribe, send it to that one friend who still thinks robots are coming for every job tomorrow.

Speaker 3Show them the hiring numbers first.

RachelExactly. Leave us a review too. It actually helps more than you think.

Speaker 3It does. We read them.

RachelWe do. Some of them are mean, but we read them.

Speaker 3Character building.

RachelThis has been The Checkout Point. Go check your deadlines.

Speaker 3And question the big number before you believe it.

RachelSee you next week.

Speaker 3Bye, everyone.