Smaller American retailers are turning to robots to automate warehouse work, techniques long used by Amazon and others, spurred on by the pandemic
In a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, a handful of people stand around the base of a white box as big as a house.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Secaucus, New Jersey warehouse in this piece is where a technique Amazon spent years perfecting — fleets of robots handling carrying and sorting so humans can focus on picking — is being copied downstream by mid-size American retailers. The trigger is the pandemic surge in home-delivered goods, which pushed shippers like FedEx toward AI-equipped robot arms as well.
What makes the story durable is what happened after: by late 2024, US federal data showed nearly 1.8M human warehouse workers, up 30% since early 2020, even as automation spread — evidence that robots still fail at the crucial, simple task of grasping arbitrary items.
First-order effects
- Small and mid-size retailers gain access to fulfillment economics previously reserved for Amazon's scale, letting them compete on delivery speed during the pandemic demand spike without hiring at Amazon's pace.
- Robotics vendors acquire a customer base beyond Amazon, whose own fleet has since grown past 750K devices across arms, heavy lifters, and sorters (Amazon's expanding robot array).
Second-order effects
- Amazon responds by deepening the moat rather than defending old advantages — its Sparrow, Cardinal, and Proteus systems now take over selecting, picking, and cart-carrying roles that smaller retailers' borrowed automation cannot yet match.
- The labor market absorbs both forces: retailers automate carrying and sorting while continuing to hire humans for the dexterity-bound work, which is why headcount rose alongside adoption.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, warehouse work bifurcates structurally into robot-executed transport and human-executed manipulation — a division already visible in how Amazon's Sparrow and Proteus operate alongside people, not instead of them.
- Automation follows the same down-market path manufacturing did with cobots reaching the smallest factories — suggesting retail fulfillment consolidates around whoever owns the robot-plus-software platform, not whoever owns the building.
The trend: Warehouse automation is diffusing from Amazon's scale down to smaller operators, but as a complement to human pickers rather than a replacement — with dexterity remaining the bottleneck.