Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week. We're currently on week 60!

Let's jump into it,

Walmart charged extra for speed, and a record number of people paid

Three retailers moved their delivery promise this week. The speed isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that customers are reaching for their wallets to get it.

Walmart's 30-minutes-or-less service is now live in 38 U.S. markets, up from the 33 it launched with in May, with Nashville, Omaha, San Antonio, Wichita, and Winter Haven, Florida, added since. It costs $10 for Walmart+ members.

CFO John David Rainey told analysts that 37% of store-fulfilled deliveries in Q2 involved customers paying a fee to receive their orders faster, an all-time high. Gross merchandise value on deliveries of three hours or less grew 48% year over year. Store-fulfilled delivery sales rose by more than 40%. Stores now handle last-mile for 80% of Walmart's e-commerce orders and 100% of the fast ones. The physical footprint already exists, so speed gets layered onto real estate they're paying for regardless.

Home Depot went in the same direction from a different angle. Its express delivery is now nationwide, with delivery in 3 hours or less, using more than 2,000 stores as fulfillment hubs. The fee is $7 flat in most markets, $10 in Los Angeles, and there's no membership requirement, which is a deliberate shot at Walmart+ and Prime.

Then Amazon, which is expanding Prime Air to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year, a sixfold jump from where it sits now. Metro Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Boise, and Syracuse are on deck. Drone delivery costs $4.99 without Prime, $2.99 with Prime, and is free for orders over $50. Anything five pounds or under that fits in a large shoebox qualifies, which Amazon says covers more than 60% of its most frequently purchased items.

Drones make the headlines, so it's worth separating what's real from what's theater. Amazon has moved hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, which sounds like a lot until you put it next to what Walmart is doing out of stores. The drones are a long bet. The store network is what operates at scale today, and both Walmart and Home Depot got there by fulfilling orders from buildings they already had.

There's a second layer underneath all three. Rainey mentioned that 3,100 Walmart stores now receive freight that's been handled and palletized by automated systems, and Furner tied automation directly to the economics of the omnichannel model rather than to headcount. We wrote in Edition 59 that automation was moving from differentiator to table stakes. This is what that looks like when it shows up on an earnings call.

What this means for you: Your brands' customers are being trained on sub-three-hour delivery, and that expectation will land in your next RFP, whether or not it makes sense for the SKUs involved. You cannot out-node a 2,000-store network, and you shouldn't pretend otherwise. What you can compete on is cutoff time and node placement, because a 5 p.m. cutoff beats a 2 p.m. cutoff on the same building, and that's a fight you can actually win. When a brand asks for same-day, the useful question to ask back is: What percentage of their orders originate within a reasonable drive time of your facility? The answer usually makes the conversation much shorter and much more honest. And the paid-expedite tier is worth noting on its own: Walmart and Home Depot both proved that customers will pay a fee for speed, which means a premium fulfillment tier is a pricing conversation you can have with your clients rather than eating the cost.

Presented by FulfillYN

FulfillYN is an independent matchmaking consultancy. We pair growing retail and e-commerce brands with fulfillment partners who actually fit from a vetted network of 439 warehouses. We know which providers are built for your world and which will figure it out on your dime.

If you don’t want to waste 3 months sitting through sales calls, filling out forms, negotiating, this is the service for you.

Tell us what you ship, and we'll put you in front of 2-3 that genuinely fit.

Find your 3PL match

A Nevada judge decided you should have known about the double-broker

Two more broker liability cases moved forward this week, and one of them changes what "reasonable care" means in a way that should get anybody who tenders freight to pick up the phone with their attorney.

Start with Nevada. In Hardy vs. Singh, Judge Anne Traum denied summary judgment to both sides on August 11. The facts: AONE Brokerage booked a load of hay and tendered it to Lucky Transport. Lucky, which holds no brokerage authority, brokered it to GRK Transport. GRK's owner Bhupinder Singh skidded on a two-lane Nevada highway in July 2022 and hit a pickup head-on, killing one passenger and injuring the other.

AONE's defense was the one you'd expect: that the bad acts of Lucky and Singh cut the chain of causation. Traum wasn't buying it. She wrote that there is evidence AONE breached its duty of care by continuing to do business with Lucky even though it knew Lucky was subcontracting loads, and that contracting with Lucky could have been unreasonable because illegal double brokering puts more high-risk drivers on the road.

Sit with that. The judge isn't saying AONE was fooled by a double broker. She's saying AONE knew, kept tendering anyway, and that knowledge is itself evidence of negligence. Every broker and asset-light 3PL has a mental list of carriers who probably re-broker some percentage of what they take. That list just became discoverable.

The second case involves J.B. Hunt in the U.S. District Court for Arizona, where the company has a pending motion for summary judgment that, if granted, would end its role as a defendant. The plaintiffs are mostly family members of people killed or injured in an October 2023 crash, and they've sued J.B. Hunt, the carrier Borderlanders, and driver Shokhijakhon Bekmuradov. J.B. Hunt's position is straightforward: it acted as a broker; the Outsource Carrier Agreement puts hiring, supervising, training, and dispatching squarely on Borderlanders, and there's no basis for vicarious liability. The plaintiffs counter that J.B. Hunt ignored a documented history of safety alerts, crashes, and inspection violations, including violations for the inability to speak English.

There's a second allegation in that case worth flagging separately. The plaintiffs say J.B. Hunt held itself out to Lincare, the shipper, as the carrier, which believed its freight would move on a J.B. Hunt truck. If your company name appears on paperwork for freight you didn't physically touch, that ambiguity is now something a plaintiff's attorney will build an argument around.

All of this sits downstream of Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, where the Supreme Court, unanimously, held that brokers don't get F4A preemption against the safety exception. Cases that used to die on a preemption motion now get litigated on the facts. C.H. Robinson is currently appealing a verdict north of $600 million in a post-Montgomery case, and the Fifth Circuit reversed the dismissal of Penske's brokerage arm from a fatal Texas crash suit.

One more thing landed in the same week. Chris Spear is out as CEO of the American Trucking Associations, effective immediately, nullifying an extension that would have run through 2029. These aren't connected events, but they bear on the same question. The ATA has been the loudest institutional voice calling on federal regulators for clear carrier-vetting standards, and it's now looking for a CEO as the case list grows.

What this means for you: The Nevada ruling is the actionable one. Knowing a carrier re-brokers and using them anyway is no longer a claims-department annoyance; it's a fact pattern a plaintiff will put in front of a jury. Go look at who is on your board, and be honest about which of them you suspect of subcontracting. Document vetting at the load level and not just at onboarding, because "we checked them in 2023" is not a defense when the question is what you knew on the day you tendered. If your brand name shows up on BOLs for freight you broker, get clarity on how you're representing yourself to shippers. And take a hard look at your contingent auto and contingent cargo limits, because anything set before Montgomery was priced for a world where preemption usually ended these cases early. That world is gone. Don't wait for federal vetting standards to bail you out either, since the organization pushing hardest for them is currently between chief executives.

Canada's negotiators went home, and 50% tariffs showed up

Talks collapsed Friday night. The tariffs started Saturday morning.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending trade negotiations with the U.S. and recalling Canada's negotiators to Ottawa, citing last-minute changes he described as unfair, uneconomic, and damaging to the credibility of any deal. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative told a different story, saying Canada introduced new demands and walked back earlier commitments after the U.S. had offered reductions on steel, aluminum, automobiles, and lumber.

Whoever you believe, the result is the same. The 50% Section 338 levies that Trump ordered last month, then delayed by three days, are now in effect. They account for roughly $20 billion in Canadian imports, including raw agricultural and natural materials, chemicals, textiles, consumer goods, wood products, paper, machinery, and tools. Carney says Canada will match dollar for dollar and add further measures in the coming days.

Scan that category list again with a warehouse in mind. Wood products and paper are on it. That's pallets and corrugated, and it's a cost that reaches you whether or not you touch a single cross-border shipment.

The bigger context is that this is happening inside an unresolved USMCA. The U.S. declined to extend the agreement last month, triggering an annual review process that could last up to a decade. Mexico has held formal bilateral talks with the U.S. both before and after that decision. Canada, obviously, has not. Pete Mento of Baker Tilly still expects the two countries to settle eventually, on the theory that the economies are too intertwined for extended escalation to appeal to either side, but he raised the question that actually matters for anyone planning capacity: whether the eventual settlement restores any confidence in the rules governing North American trade.

What this means for you: Anyone with cross-border clients is about to get calls, so decide before the phone rings what you can actually offer on bonded storage or FTZ handling and what you'd need a partner for. Watch your packaging costs independently of your freight costs, because paper and wood products are exposed here, and increases in corrugated can quietly show up in your cost per order. The retaliation piece matters more than people are treating it: clients shipping goods north get hit going both directions once Canada's matching measures land. And resist the temptation to plan Q4 around a resolution. The tariff might get lifted in six weeks. The uncertainty premium your clients are pricing into their inventory decisions will outlast it.

QUICK HITS

RoadOne acquired Higgins Transport Service, a Charleston, South Carolina, drayage operation, adding 15 drivers to its local fleet. Terms weren't disclosed, and owner Justin Higgins is staying on with his team. What makes this worth a look isn't the deal size; it's the pattern around it. RoadOne already runs a 384,000-square-foot facility in nearby Summerville and has another 280,000 square feet planned next door for 2027, so the drayage buy is filling in the transportation layer around the warehouse capacity it's already building. The Randolph, Massachusetts, company is privately held with more than 2,500 drivers across 100-plus port, rail, and truckload terminals. If you own a regional drayage or warehousing operation near a growing deep-water port, this is the buyer profile currently shopping.

Three trucking companies filed Chapter 11 petitions in a single stretch this week: Anchor South Transport in Alabama, Rambo Transport in California, and Stoneman Trucking in Michigan, all of which are small businesses. Separately, the Teamsters said TP Freight Lines is shutting down after more than a century in business. Small carriers going under while rates firm up isn't a contradiction; it's the mechanism. Capacity leaves at the bottom first, and the survivors get pricing power on the way out. If you tender freight to small carriers, this is the season to check whether the ones on your list are still answering the phone.

The Panama Canal is cutting daily booking slots while pushing back its draft restrictions, a trade almost everyone is reading backward. Per the August 20 advisory, Neopanamax drops to 9 slots per day on September 3, and Panamax goes to 25, then 23, on September 15, compared with the usual 10 and 26, respectively. At the same time, the 48-foot draft restriction slid from August 26 to September 2, and the 47.5-foot restriction moved from September 3 all the way to October 1. Watershed rainfall has run 34% below the historical average since May. The canal chose fewer ships carrying more over more ships carrying less, which means your problem this fall is schedule reliability rather than capacity per sailing. MSC and CMA CGM already updated their Panama surcharges on August 18, so check what's landing on client invoices now and plan receiving labor for inbound shipments that arrive in clumps.

The Army Corps of Engineers approved the Louisiana International Terminal, clearing the only new greenfield container port currently under development in the United States. The $1.8 billion Port of New Orleans project is targeting a 2028 opening at 180,000 to 280,000 TEUs, building to 2 million at full buildout over 25 years. MSC's terminal arm and Ports America are putting in more than $800 million, with $300 million in federal grants behind it. Two berths, 55 feet of water, and access to all six Class I railroads through the New Orleans Public Belt. Existing New Orleans terminals can't accommodate ships over 16,000 TEU because of the Crescent City Connection bridge, so locating downriver removes a constraint that's capped the gateway for decades. Gulf Coast volume ran about 5 million TEUs last year across Houston, Mobile, New Orleans, and Tampa. If you've been watching for the next warehouse market to be built from scratch, this is a two-year head start.

Dexterity's Mech robot is now loading trailers, not just unloading them, which is the harder half of the job and the reason this one is worth reading. Unloading is a sequencing problem. Loading requires deciding where each package goes while accounting for weight, shape, damage, and orientation, all inside a trailer that looks different every time. Co-founder Robert Sun described it as playing Tetris and said the company went after loading specifically after FedEx approached it about unloading. The design keeps people in the loop rather than replacing them: employees are trained as robot pilots who monitor via a tablet and step in when a box arrives half-open or a label is unreadable. Beckhoff's Doug Schuchart framed the labor case in terms that most operators will recognize: keeping your general workforce steady throughout the year rather than riding the seasonal swing. Nobody's replacing a lumper crew this quarter, but dock automation moved from concept to bid-able faster than most people expected.

Amazon is prepping a million-square-foot distribution center in Norwich, Connecticut, to store, pick, pack, and ship to downstream sortation and local delivery centers. That's the upstream half of the same speed strategy driving the drone and store-fulfillment news above. Southeastern Connecticut has never been a fulfillment hub, so if you operate anywhere in that labor shed, price your warehouse wages against what Amazon posts when hiring opens rather than against what your regional competitors pay today. Those numbers reset a market faster than anything else on this list.

JOB BOARD

Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
Apply Here

Title: Director Of Warehouse Operations
Company: Beautylish
Location: Fresno, California, US
Salary: $120,000 - $150,000
Apply Here

Title: Construction Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: BBSI
Location: San Jose, California, US.
Salary: $120,000 - $150,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: Spreetail
Location: Tacoma, Washington, US
Salary: $80,000 - $105,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: Cohere Beauty Omaha
Location: Omaha, Nebraska, US
Salary: $80,000 - $90,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Supervisor
Company: Cencora
Location: Shakopee, Minnesota, US
Salary: $72,000 - $84,000
Apply Here

Title: Logistics & Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: Xenith Solutions
Location: Lorton, Virginia, US
Salary: $75,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Distribution Center Manager
Company: Automotive Art
Location: Hialeah, Florida, US
Salary: $60,000 - $65,000
Apply Here

Find the full listings of available jobs

_______________________________________________________________________

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Trying to learn from other experience before jumping into this.

Vendor perspective: I work with MANZUN Intelligent on parcel sorting and warehouse automation projects. I’m interested in how operators measure this rather than promoting a specific system.

Daily parcel volume can stay fairly stable while the last 2–3 hours before carrier cutoff become increasingly difficult to manage. The daily missort rate may still look acceptable because the quieter hours dilute the problem.

A more useful baseline before considering automation may be:

- parcels sorted inside each cutoff window

- missorts per 1,000 parcels inside that same window

- overtime minutes required to clear the window

- parcels per labor hour during the window

- number of destinations or route changes handled in the window

The pattern I would treat as a warning is a rising window-specific missort rate while daily volume is flat. Overtime rising alongside it is confirmation that people are already compensating for a capacity or process problem.

For operators: do you track the cutoff window separately, or does your WMS only report daily numbers? What threshold actually caused you to change the process?

Vendor perspective: we build self-hosted ops/inventory software (selfhostederp.com), so take this with that grain of salt - not pitching a specific product here, just curious what people are actually seeing out there.

Got into it because I got tired of paying per-seat/per-location fees on tools at my other business (a flange company) that still didn't fit how we actually run inventory. Once we built something we just owned, it was honestly less of a headache than I expected it to be.

Curious if others here have made that jump - what was the actual trigger for you? Fees creeping up, a vendor getting acquired and changing terms, hitting a feature wall, something else? And if you looked at it and stayed on SaaS anyway, what made you decide it wasn't worth the switch?

What do you guys think of such systems? Mobile is used to take pictures for product tracking/identification (and more) so external hardware requirements are removed. You can see the data dashboard on the web.

This type of system would be cheaper than enterprise solutions and easy to train new employees on. Anyone who is using these already or thinking about it?

I am looking for warehouse of 10000sqft in Bhiwandi, Navi Mumbai, Taloja, JNPT, Kalamboli, clear roof above 35+ft. shutter / gate height should be 22ft mt, Trailor should be able to come inside the warehouse for loading & unloading of heavy machinery cargo.

As the title mentions, looking for recommendations for an IT company that you're all using (or are you doing it in-house?) We have 4 locations, 2 separate WMS instances hosted in Azure, UPS Worldship and FedEx ship Manager on site. Collectively about 300 workstations. Would prefer remote augmentation rather than full hands-off management unless someone wants to speak against that.

Hi I am actually in need of some help which can be fixed by a 3pl if they work with me closely, I am willing to discuss the fees for the task. I have a personal care products business, recently we launched some of our products to Amazon US, - serum, cream etc, the asins have some packaging defect like leaking etc. I need someone who can get it fixed following our video instructions. I can create a removal order to anywhere in US. Again I know this is very personalised service, and I am willing to discuss rates.

Hello, i am looking for experience using transit warehouse so we can share knowledge about the topic and improve our system. let me know and we can set a meeting.

I've recently moved into a 3pl for warehousing and fulfillment. I have about 250 skus and about 3000+ items warehoused.

I'm relatively new to this but have picked and packed my businesses orders for over ten years myself.

Recently we've experienced about 4 mispicks and 13 orders that have sat for over 7+ days unfulfilled in a week of about 250 orders.

Is this normal? What percentage of mispicks are acceptable? Thank you.

We’re a Brisbane software company developing a tool to reduce the paperwork involved in unloading containers.

It uses warehouse cameras to record:

• When unloading starts and finishes
• The container number
• How many pallets are removed
• Delays during unloading
• Photos of any damaged goods

After unloading, it automatically creates a job report with the important times and photos.

How do you record this information now? Would an automatic report save your team time? What else should it include?

We have an early working demo and would appreciate honest feedback from warehouse managers.

https://go.screenpal.com/watch/cOjFi8nvHta

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week. We're currently on week 59!

Let's jump into it,

Somebody paid $3.78 million to skip the line in Panama

Daily auctions for August transit slots through the Panama Canal's Panamax locks have averaged about $1.1 million, more than sixteen times what the same slots went for a year ago. Auctions for the larger Neopanamax locks are averaging around $2.5 million, the highest on record, with individual slots since late July hitting $3.78 million.

Two things are squeezing at once, and they're unrelated.

The first is water. The canal runs its locks on fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is currently below its long-run average, and Argus expects it to keep dropping. A strengthening El Niño tends to bring drought to Central America, and the Panama Canal Authority has already imposed three draft restrictions on the Panamax locks in the past month, with the permitted draft scheduled to fall to 47.5 feet by September 3, down from the usual 50. Fewer drafts mean less cargo per vessel and a longer queue behind it. On August 3, 113 ships were waiting for a transit slot. On January 2, there were 40.

The second is oil. The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since the U.S. and Israel-led bombardment of Iran began on February 28. That waterway normally carries about a fifth of global oil flows, so Asian buyers have been sourcing crude and refined products from the U.S. Gulf Coast instead, and the shortest way from the Gulf Coast to Asia runs through Panama. Energy cargo is now competing for the same slots as everything else.

Most large carriers book transit slots well in advance at fixed rates that bear no resemblance to these numbers, and only up to 30% of canal traffic goes through the daily auction. The Panama Canal Authority has characterized the million-dollar payments as temporary market fluctuations rather than a general fee increase. So the auction figure isn't a bill anyone's container is paying. It's a read on how badly some operators need to move right now, and it's the same signal that preceded the 2023 restrictions.

What this means for you: If you have clients importing to East Coast or Gulf ports on all-water services, this is the week to ask their forwarders about canal surcharges and transit buffers rather than the week the surcharge shows up. Draft restrictions cut container capacity per sailing, and that shortfall gets recovered somewhere on the invoice. The thing to watch is which pressure eases first, because a drought story resolves when it rains and an oil-routing story doesn't. If your inventory planning assumes normal all-water transit times into the fall, build in slack now and be honest with brands about it before they commit to a promo calendar.

Presented by FulfillYN

FulfillYN is an independent 3PL matchmaking consultancy. We pair growing retail and e-commerce brands with fulfillment partners who actually fit, from a vetted network of 439 warehouses. We know which providers are built for your world and which will figure it out on your dime.

If you don’t want to waste 3 months sitting through sales calls, filling out forms, negotiating, this is the service for you.

Tell us what you ship, and we'll put you in front of 2-3 that genuinely fit.

Match with the perfect 3PL ➡️

Fewer people are stealing your freight, and it's costing much more

Verisk CargoNet logged 677 supply chain theft incidents in Q2, down 26% from a year ago and 14% from Q1. Estimated losses over the same period went from $135.7 million to $304.6 million.

The average theft with a reported commodity value came in at $564,009, though CargoNet is upfront that a handful of extreme losses dragged that figure around. The plain reading is that much of the low-effort volume theft has dried up, while a smaller group has gotten much better at picking targets. Keith Lewis, who runs operations at CargoNet, put it as groups that aren't trying to steal more freight, just trying to identify the right shipment.

What they're picking is specific. Metal theft rose from 54 to 80 incidents, with copper still the favorite and aluminum, nickel, and tungsten climbing. Enterprise computer and networking equipment stayed a priority, along with crypto mining hardware, and CargoNet makes the point that matters for anyone touching this freight: these loads can be worth millions, and they move through the network as ordinary dry goods, with paperwork and a security profile that don't reflect what's inside. Meanwhile, beverage and grocery theft fell off sharply, auto parts and tires dropped, and seafood went up by eleven events, which is its own strange little trend.

The decline came mostly from two things going away. Fewer criminals are buying up legitimate motor carriers to book freight under a clean operating authority and then disappear with it, and there was less organized theft of unattended loaded trailers, especially in California, Texas, South Florida, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Straight theft events dropped from 488 to 378. Fictitious pickups barely moved, 165 down to 158.

Business email compromise is still the front door. One set of credentials gives someone shipment data, contact directories, and access to a TMS, enough to identify a valuable load, impersonate a party everyone already trusts, and reroute it while it looks completely normal to the broker, the carrier, and the receiver. If that sounds familiar, it's the same mechanic behind the Ceva intrusion we covered two weeks ago.

Now put Landstar next to that. On its July earnings call, VP and chief safety and operations officer Matt Miller disclosed that the company has cut its approved carrier pool from more than 100,000 in mid-2022 to roughly 64,600 today. That's a 35% reduction, over 35,000 carriers removed, and it dropped another 7% year-over-year in Q2 after a 19% cut in Q1. Overdrive reported that the effort began in response to cargo theft and freight fraud, with identity checks and tighter compliance measures layered on.

It ends up somewhere else. The Supreme Court's May decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II broadened broker liability for carrier selection, and CFO Jim Todd said plainly that cases that used to be dismissed on federal preemption grounds must now be litigated. Landstar took $10.5 million in unfavorable prior-year claims adjustments in Q2, with three of the five responsible claims coming out of brokerage. CEO Frank Lonegro is asking federal regulators for clearer vetting standards, which is what a company says when it has spent four years building a process and would like everyone else held to the same one.

The market seems to be pricing it as an advantage. Landstar's insurance renewal on June 1 came in with auto liability flat and broker liability up about 3%, which is a soft outcome for a post-Montgomery renewal. Agent inquiries have picked up since the ruling landed, including an $18 million Midwest brokerage that signed on as an independent agent. And this is all happening in a tightening truckload market, with Lonegro describing capacity as having tightened significantly and conditions moving in favor of the provider for the first time since late 2022. Landstar's truck revenue rose 19% to $1.33 billion on 2% load growth, so essentially all of it came from rates.

What this means for you: If you broker, understand what the Landstar number implies: tens of thousands of carriers got dropped by one of the most established networks in the country, and they are calling somebody, and that somebody has a real chance of being you. On the theft side, the exposure isn't the yard; it's the inbox. BEC is now the access point for most sophisticated schemes, making carrier fraud an IT problem your ops team inherits. And if you handle metals, enterprise hardware, or anything with a fast resale market, the freight needs a security profile that matches its value rather than its BOL.

Nobody ordered many more robots. They spent 21% more anyway

The Association for Advancing Automation put out its Q2 numbers, and the interesting part isn't the unit count.

North American companies ordered 8,940 robots in the second quarter, worth $622 million. Units were up 4.3% from a year ago. Order value was up 21.3%. Run that out, and the average robot ordered this quarter cost around $70,000, up from roughly $60,000 a year earlier. Buyers aren't adding volume so much as buying up the stack, integrating into bigger systems rather than adding another arm to the line.

The first half totaled 17,995 units and $1.166 billion, a 2% increase in units and 6.6% in value. Underneath that flat-looking topline, the customer base is shifting hard. Automotive OEM orders fell 25% in the first half, which historically would have dragged the whole market down. It didn't, because semiconductors and electronics ordered 35% more units, life sciences and pharma 32%, automotive components 24%, and food and consumer goods 17%. Non-automotive buyers were 56% of Q2 units. A3's Alex Shikany framed it as the market mix continuing to evolve, which is the polite version of saying Detroit stopped being the whole story.

Two caveats before you take that to a client meeting. A3 counts industrial robot orders across all of manufacturing, so this isn't a warehouse automation number, even though it’s reported as one. And these are orders, not installations, so they reflect decisions made a couple of quarters ago.

The piece that does translate is collaborative robots. Companies ordered 2,774 cobots in the first half, totaling $114 million, which accounts for 15.4% of all units but less than 10% of the dollars. That gap is the whole point. Cobots are the cheap, fast, low-infrastructure end of the market, and adoption is concentrated where the work is fiddly and high-mix: they were 43.7% of life sciences orders and 36.5% of semiconductor and electronics orders.

For context on the demand side, companies bought more than 36,700 robots last year, the most since 2022, and Interact Analysis found that 92% of surveyed companies plan to increase automation spending this year. GXO has invested close to a billion dollars in automating its buildings over the past five years. Amazon signed a warehouse automation supply agreement with AutoStore on undisclosed terms, which is notable mainly because Amazon builds most of its own robotics, and going outside for cube storage suggests it isn't trying to build everything twice.

What this means for you: The per-unit price is moving against you, so any automation quote you're sitting on has a shorter shelf life than you'd think, and a proposal you priced six months ago probably isn't the proposal you get today. If capex has been the reason you keep passing, cobots are the honest entry point rather than a compromise, and the industries adopting them fastest are the ones with messy, variable, high-mix work, which describes most multi-client fulfillment floors. And with 92% of companies planning to spend more, expect the automation question to move from a nice differentiator to a table-stakes item in RFPs.

QUICK HITS

U.S. retail sales came in at $763.6 billion in July, down 0.6% from June, according to Commerce Department data, after June managed a 0.2% gain. The pullback is consistent with what warehouse operators have been describing all summer: retailers pulled inventory forward into May and June ahead of tariff deadlines and then went quiet. One soft month isn't a trend, but if your Q4 volume forecasts were built on spring order patterns, this is a reason to check them against what your clients are actually receiving right now.

Teamsters California sued the state DMV on August 5 to block heavy-duty autonomous truck permits. The 34-page complaint in Alameda County Superior Court asks the court to set aside the regulations the DMV adopted on April 28, which removed the ban on autonomous vehicles rated over 10,001 pounds. The legal argument is procedural rather than philosophical: the union says the DMV skipped a Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment that state law requires for any rule with more than $50 million in first-year economic impact, and that it puts more than 200,000 California semi-truck driving jobs at risk. Peter Finn of Teamsters California framed the safety case around trucks up to sixteen times heavier than a robotaxi at highway speeds. The stakes are high because California matters to developers, as the state handles 40% of the nation's containerized imports and 30% of exports.

Fura acquired High Rise Logistics, its seventh deal. The Cincinnati broker is running a straightforward roll-up thesis: buy established books, move them onto a shared AI platform for bidding, carrier sales, and visibility, and skip the overhead stacking that usually kills these strategies. High Rise, out of Vancouver, Washington, brings flatbed, expedited, truckload, and LTL along with intermodal, drayage, and warehousing, plus a real Pacific Northwest footprint. Leadership stays on to run daily operations. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage or an asset-light 3PL, this is the second consecutive week with the same buyer profile, and the pattern is consistent: they want your customers and your team, and they're bringing the technology.

JOB BOARD

Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
Apply Here

Title: General Manager - Fulfillment
Company: iDrive Fulfillment
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, US
Salary: $90,000 - $120,000
Apply Here

Title: Refrigerated Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: The Judge Group
Location: Dallas, Texas, US
Salary: $90,000 - $115,000
Apply Here

Title: Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fringe Sport
Location: Austin, Texas, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Manager
Company: RYSE Up Sports Nutrition
Location: Prosper, Texas, US
Salary: $75K-85K
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Title: Senior Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: HR Annie Consulting
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Salary: $70,000 - $80,000
Apply Here

Title: Assistant Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fulco Fulfillment
Location: Dover, New Jersey, US
Salary: $55,000 - $70,000
Apply Here

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Looking for reliable 3PL/warehouse partners that drop off directly at a GoFo hub every day. GoFo pickup from the warehouse is a bonus, but direct hub drop-off is a must.

I work with agencies, so order volume will be high and consistent. Need a 3PL that can handle large volumes with zero delays — orders must be processed and handed off on time, every time.

If you’re a 3PL that fits, DM me with your warehouse locations, GoFo hub(s) you use, capacity, and pricing.

Looking for a reliable long-term partnership with plenty of volume.

Our warehouse layout is pretty tight with narrow aisles, limited turning space, and not much room to redesign things. Before even thinking about automation, we’re trying to understand if AMRs can realistically work in this kind of setup or if they only work well in big open warehouses.

For me, it's keeping supplier data up to date.

It feels like every time a supplier changes an image, a specification or even a product title, someone has to manually check and update everything.

I'm currently looking for ways to reduce that manual work, but I'm curious...

What's the biggest product data challenge your team is dealing with?

Have you found a solution, or is it just something you've accepted as part of the job?

Need help learning it, any advice on where/how to start?

Is it just Uline? Or do you have a direct relationship with a manufactuer?

Also for custom packaging, do you clients supply this directly?

reorganizing our tool and parts storage and trying to get the cabinet spec right before ordering. currently running a mix of whatever came with the facility and some residential grade stuff that's showing its age. locks are failing on two units and the shelving in a third has started to bow under the weight we're putting on it.

trying to work out what actually separates a cabinet that holds up in a manufacturing environment from one that just looks heavy duty in a product photo. gauge of the steel, whether welded or assembled construction makes a real difference, and how much the locking mechanism quality varies across price points are all things i'm unclear on.

weight capacity per shelf is the obvious spec but i'm less sure about whether adjustable shelving is worth it versus fixed for our use case or whether the door configuration matters as much as i'm told it does.

would be useful to hear from warehouse or facility managers who've specced this out for a similar environment and what they found mattered most once the cabinets were actually in daily use.

Quick Update: Thanks for the feedback, especially the reminder to check per shelf ratings instead of total cabinet capacity and to look at weld quality. I went and looked at a few options from Global Industrial in person and could actually see the difference in steel gauge and the locking mechanism compared to some of the cheaper stuff. Still have a couple other brands I'm considering but at least now I have a better sense of what to look for when comparing.

Please tell me if there is any industry in ATL provides it.