Ask a picker to wear a step tracker for a week and the numbers surprise everyone but the picker: large-facility warehouse workers commonly log 8–12 miles per shift—a half-marathon of concrete, several days a week. That distance is a line item nobody budgets, paid at full labor rates.
What the walking costs
- Payroll: at a 3 mph walking pace, ten miles is over three hours of transit inside an eight-to-ten-hour shift. Multiply across a crew and you're staffing entire headcount positions that do nothing but walk.
- Fatigue and throughput: output degrades late in shifts as legs give out; error rates and shortcut-taking rise with fatigue.
- Injuries: cumulative loading on feet, knees, and backs feeds the musculoskeletal claims that dominate warehouse comp costs.
- Retention: exit interviews in high-turnover DCs repeatedly surface physical toll as a quit driver.
Measure it in your building
You don't need a study—you need a week of data. Step counters on volunteers by role, plus a stopwatch on the five most common routes. Convert steps to miles, miles to hours, hours to dollars at loaded rates. Most operations managers who run this exercise stop debating whether transit is a problem and start debating which vehicle to buy.
Buying the distance back
- Shrink routes first: slotting and layout fixes are free distance reduction.
- Wheel the remainder: warehouse scooters and stock chasers for individual roles; personnel carriers where crews move together; tuggers where the walking is really load-moving in disguise.
- Target the extremes: the maintenance tech crossing the plant six times a shift and the picker assigned to the far zone benefit most—start there and let results sell the rollout.
TexTrack's calculator turns your routes and rates into a payback estimate in minutes. Estimate your savings.
