Smart Balls, Dumb Robots, & Cheap Wine · Storyflo

Happy Friday! On this day in 1923, Walt and Roy Disney started a little animation company with a four-page contract and a few cartoon ideas.

103 years later, that little venture has become a global entertainment empire, proving that even the biggest businesses start somewhere…and that if you create a popular enough mouse, you can eventually charge people $200 to stand in line for two hours.

Anyway, welcome to The Weekly. Let’s get into it.

Walmart’s

Billion-Dollar Planto Get Rid of Humans Isn’t Going WellWine Sales Are Tanking.

**Is Tequila the Answer?****Siri’s Moving In.**Hope You Like Your New Roommate.Optimism is Nice.

**Math is Better.****And from Around the Web:**Balls, Brushes, and Brainwaves

The news shaping business, finance, and technology, for better or considerably worse.

In Walmart’s perfect world, workers wouldn’t touch a box until it arrived at the store, neatly stacked and ready for the shelf. Unfortunately, robots haven’t gotten that memo.

The retail giant has spent billions trying to automate its 200 U.S. supply-chain buildings serving 5,200 stores. It’s also playing catch-up with Amazon, which overtook Walmart as the world’s biggest company by annual sales in 2025.

But modernizing warehouses built in the 1980s hasn’t been cheap or easy. Electric bills at automated grocery facilities can hit $800,000 a month, compared with $250,000 when operations were more manual. And the robots keep breaking. About 5% are being repaired at any given time, down from 10% last year.

Walmart’s supply chain is a complicated beast. Some warehouses sort everyday goods before shipping them to 42 distribution centers. Others handle groceries, frozen food, and online orders.

The company also missed its January automation targets. By August, it was getting close, with more than 65% of stores receiving some automated freight and over half of e-commerce goods moving through automated systems.

One particularly stubborn problem? Online orders packed inside stores. **Walmart has spent nearly $1 billion since 2016 trying to automate that process. **Tight spaces, complicated orders, and customers waiting impatiently in parking lots aren’t exactly robot-friendly.

After years of throwing money at the problem, consultants reportedly recommended something radical: putting people back into the process.

Imagine that. One day, customers might even leave their cars, roam the aisles like wildebeests on the savanna, and interact with actual mammals.

What a time to be alive.

Automation can save money, but only when the cost of making it work doesn't eat up the savings.

🔗 See how Walmart's billion-dollar robot experiment keeps running into a very human problem.

California’s wine crisis just got real. With demand falling and warehouses overflowing, winemakers are unloading premium bottles to retailers like Costco, Aldi, and Kroger, which sell them under private labels at steep discounts.

**How steep? A Napa Valley cabernet that normally fetches up to $85 is now selling for $9.99 at Grocery Outlet. 🤯 **

The state’s** $84 billion** wine industry is taking a beating. U.S. wine sales hit a 20-year low last year, as younger generations drink less and aging boomers cut back on their nightly glass of red. Canada’s boycott of American alcohol also cost California winemakers an estimated $357 million last year.

And 2026 could be worse. Only about half of California’s grape harvest was under contract when picking season began, compared with the usual 70% to 80%. Major wineries have gone bankrupt, and growers are ripping out vines they no longer need.

Some farmers are replacing grapes with pistachios, almonds, and olives. Others are betting on agave, the plant used to make tequila and mezcal.

Agave needs less water and maintenance than grapes, but there’s a catch. It takes roughly five years to mature. And while tequila has held up better than wine, there’s no guarantee Americans will embrace a California version.

Five years of waiting on a thirsty consumer who may or may not show up. Get those farm subsidies ready, Gub’na!

Changing consumer habits can upend an entire industry, and finding a new product to sell isn't always a quick fix.

🔗 From $10 Napa cabernets to California-grown tequila, see how the wine industry is trying to drink its way out of trouble.

Apple unveiled HomeView this week, a $299, seven-inch smart display that marks its biggest push yet into the smart home market. It’s also the second major product launch under new CEO John Ternus.

Think CarPlay for your house, or an oversized Apple Watch sitting on your kitchen counter.

HomeView will compete with Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub, which have been around for years. Apple’s advantage? It already has millions of iPhones to connect with.

Powered by Siri AI, HomeView handles FaceTime, Messages, Calendar, Reminders, and basic questions like, “What’s the weather?” Facial recognition identifies up to six people and adjusts the experience for whoever is standing in front of it.

Apple wants this gadget to become the control center of your home. It also introduced smart locks, doorbells, thermostats, and security cameras developed with LG and Schneider Electric.

There’s the usual Apple catch, though. The more Apple devices your household owns, the better everything works. That walled garden just got another wall.

Apple also says it can’t access personal data processed through its private cloud system, keeping your information away from its own servers and marketing teams.

**A tech company collecting personal information without finding a way to profit from it? **Now that’s innovation.

Apple's betting that convenience, privacy, and its loyal customers can help it enter a market where Amazon and Google already have a head start.

One minute of money talk. Several expensive mistakes avoided.

with Matthew R. Meehan

Small business owners are getting a little nervous. The latest NFIB Small Business Optimism Index slipped to 97.9 in September, and only 7% of owners say it’s a good time to expand. Between inflation, hiring headaches, and borrowing costs, Main Street isn’t exactly popping champagne.

*…but interest rates are too high. …but customers aren’t spending enough. …but the economy feels shaky. *

Pick a decade, and somebody’s got a reason to wait.

That doesn’t mean you should blindly expand, either. I’ve seen plenty of owners confuse a good opportunity with an expensive mistake.

Before you make your next big move, ask yourself three things:

**Can my cash flow support it?****What’s the actual return?**And what happens if it takes twice as long to pay off as I expect?

If those answers hold up, you might have something worth pursuing. If they don’t, no amount of optimism is going to fix the math.

The economy doesn’t need to give you permission to grow. But your numbers probably should.

The internet’s least supervised corner. Useful? Debatable. Entertaining? Always.

**They’ve Got Serious Balls:**The NBA isthat track movement, settle disputed calls, and analyze shooting skills. The chips weigh just one gram, so players won’t notice a thing, until the ball starts providingtesting basketballs with tiny microchipsmore accurate informationthan the three guys in striped shirts.**A Brush With the Law:**French police recovered two stolen Renoir paintings and arrested six suspectsThe masterpieces are headed back where they belong, while the thieves may soon havenearly a month after the artwork vanished from a museum.*plenty of time to explore the fine art of making license plates.***A Penny for Your Data:**A California startup just raisedusing$50 million to develop a baseball cap that lets you communicate with AI*nothing but your thoughts.*It uses 100,000 sensors to read brain activity. We guess having our phones listen to everything we say wasn’t invasive enough.

Stay connected with ** Credit Banc**, proud sponsor of

Smart Balls, Dumb Robots, & Cheap Wine · Storyflo