Walmart has made it no secret that it won’t go gentle into Amazon’s good night, revealing last year that it would slow brick-and-mortar openings in order to focus on e-commerce expansion.
“Using our patents search engine, we have unearthed a newly published Walmart patent application (originally filed in October 2016) for an IoT platform to track the way products are used in shoppers’ homes. The system places automatic re-orders when the product is used up or needs to be replaced.”