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On October 1 Walmart opened a new fulfillment center. According to the company, "The 1.2 million sq. ft. facility in Union City, just south of Atlanta, is the third large-scale e-commerce fulfillment center to open in the U.S. in as many months, and features state-of-the-art automation and warehousing systems."

 According to Reuters:

Competition with online rivals including Amazon.com, which recently surpassed it in market value, has heated up and Wal-Mart has committed as much as $1.5 billion this year to invest in e-commerce. Much of that is going into large-scale warehouses dedicated to fulfilling online orders. It now has five such facilities, from which it says it will be able deliver to 95 percent of country in two days. The facilities - some big enough to house two cruise liners - will enable it to receive, sort and ship packages faster and at a lower cost, Michael Bender, chief operating officer of global e-commerce, said in an interview.

Last week Amazon opened a similar-sized new fulfillment center outside Baltimore.  According to The Sun:

The 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center, which the state and city lured to Baltimore two years ago with an incentive package of more than $43 million, started operations March 30, while still under construction. Now tens of thousands of packages ship to customers each day from the building. The firm also opened a smaller sorting center nearby last October. The bigger building, where Amazon now employs more than 3,000 people, is open 24 hours a day, with staff working in staggered 10-hour, four-day-a-week shifts.

Construction companies for distribution and fulfillment centers say that since the turn of the century the average size of new facilities has tripled to just about 900,000 square feet. As Amazon and Walmart demonstrate, plenty are even larger.