The large retail warehouses are, for the average shopper, seen as something massive and mysterious.
In the summer of 2021, Amazon (AMZN) opened its five-story, 3.6 million-square-foot warehouse in Tennessee's Mt. Juliet while Walmart (WMT) is currently preparing to open a new 2.2-million-square-foot facility 20 miles outside Indianapolis in the summer of 2023.
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While the retail giants regularly release footage from inside the distribution centers, curiosity around everything from worker conditions to the types of technology used to fulfill such a massive stream of online orders make them a constant source of public curiosity — every couple of months, inside footage from a worker goes social media viral.
Another Warehouse Worker Video Is Going Viral
On April 22, a self-described former Walmart worker with the TikTok username @digitaljared posted a video from inside a Walmart supercenter, which is what the retail giant calls its supermarkets with the largest array of products.
This is the largest store designed for shoppers in comparison to the off-limit warehouses from which Walmart's inventory is stored and shipped. In the video, Jared unlocks the mysteries behind the ship-from-store program that was significantly expanded amid the surge of online orders during the covid-19 outbreak.
"You guys ever buy from Walmart.com and think 'oh, man, it's coming from the DC [distribution center] and everything?" Jared asks in the video meant to show that quite a few items are actually shipped from the same stores where people shop.
He points toward a backdoor showing shelves of stock and explains that many of the items are plucked from shelves and shipped directly to buyers.
"You think it be coming from DC, mm-mm," Jared says while shaking his head dramatically. "Them pickers be picking right from that shelf, putting it in a little pick cart, wrapping it up, putting it on a little FedEx (FEDEX) truck. At 6 o'clock, that truck's out the door and guess what, they got another truck backed up empty and ready to go."
'Another Truck Backed Up And Ready To Go'
The video quickly picked up steam and, in two days, amassed more than 60,000 views and nearly 2,000 likes.
While Walmart has poured a lot of resources into advertising its ship-from-store program as a leap into the future, the misconception around everything coming from a warehouse remains.
Half of the responses express surprise while the other half is how "everybody knows this" and that "nobody thought it was coming directly from a DC."
"Every smart big box business does this now," wrote user @smartcarrey. "They have to leverage their stores as mini DCs to kill two birds with one stone."
As distribution centers are usually located farther away from urban centers, ship-from-store programs are often a way for retailers to offer customers "one day shipping" — Walmart competitor Target TICKER has also spent significant resources expanding its ship-from-store program.
As brick-and-mortar Amazon stores are just a tiny part of its wider e-commerce business, ship-from-store allows other retailers to compete with the retail giant when it comes to shipping speed by forgoing the distribution center.
"We're going to figure out what combination of choices we need to make from a supply chain point of view," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said when the program was first being launched in 2020. "Where to route orders through, how much to pay people... You know we've got a lot to work with to sort it out."
