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Inside Newegg's East Coast Distribution Center
MrSeb writes "Did you know that Newegg is the second largest e-tailer in the U.S., after Amazon? Perhaps building your own computer isn't dead yet! Matthew Murray was recently invited to take a tour of the Newegg east coast distribution center and see what goes on behind the scenes. 'The 350,000-square-foot Edison warehouse not only houses some 15,000 SKUs of products, it also ships as many as 15,000 packages a day ... All of the different products the company carries are sorted both by category and how easy they are to move: Obviously, HDTVs are more cumbersome and difficult to remove safely than processors. Some mobile equipment, such as laptops, netbooks, and tablets, are stored in a special “high-value” area behind a chain-link fence that’s been erected within the warehouse itself.'"
"Some mobile equipment, such as laptops, netbooks, and tablets, are stored in a special 'high-value' area behind a chain-link fence thatâ(TM)s been erected within the warehouse itself."
Prediction: Multi-million dollar tablet heist within 6 months.
That fence isn't there to keep you or me out. The walls and doors of the building do that. (Presumably. I haven't been to NewEgg's warehouses myself.)
The fence is to protect the products from employees and other staffers already in the building. Only the more trust-worthy employees can get into the cage. The minimum-wage semi-transient workers are kept out. It's a fairly common technique -- most retail stores do something similar. Certain items (typically small, high-value, and popular) are frequent targets of employee theft, and that's where that stuff goes.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I RTFS and all I can think is "I have never heard the word 'e-tailer' before, but I already hate it."
OK, Clueless guy visits an order fulfillment center. Not even a very interesting one. No Kiva robots like "soap.com", no incredibly fast processing on long orders for many tiny items like "digikey.com", no unusual outsourcing like UPS's laptop repair center.. Just an ordinary fulfillment center.
Maybe next he'll get out of Manhattan and visit a factory.
(Then again, "Pawn Stars" and "Storage Wars" are actual reality shows.)
Those guys are slower than snails.
Hope they treat their employees better than Amazon, though!
A bit out of date now, but Anandtech did a similar warehouse tour at the California location back in 2006. And one at the New Jersey location back in 2008.
As a former retail drone, I must confirm this as the case 25 years ago.
We had the candy room and the car stereo room.
The car stereo room for obvious reasons, and the candy room for the reason that it's all too easy to just cruise on by and grab something yummy and not even write it in the shrinkage book - keep honest people honest.
--
BMO
Yep, if you visit a Fry's electronics, the RAM, processors and other high value per volumetric cm objects are kept in a literal wrought iron cage behind the counters. I worked at a CompUSA back in high school; the Palm Pilots and Handspring Visors, laptops and whatnot were kept in a separate room. You had to walk through the cash office (already a locked door), inside the cash office was a second locked door that took you to the electronics lockup room, which contained a fenced off set of 5-10 shelves with laptops and palm pilots, etc. I only saw the inside of that room once in the 18 months I worked there. I think the Fry's cage used to hold SD and CF cards as well, back when an 8GB card fetched more than $15.
moox. for a new generation.
That didn't matter at Computer City or CompUSA. A buddy of mine worked at both of those (by virtue of one absorbing the other) and when both stores were closed he was kept on to help close them. One store apparently never had its camera system installed, and they found that out when they took down those fisheye covers in the ceiling to find them devoid of cameras but chock full of empty merchandise packaging, mostly memory and hard disk drive packaging. Literally a couple-hundred-thousand dollars worth of missing merchandise. Based on where the storage for these products was, it looks like employees were opening packages, stuffing the products into their clothes, and then tossing the packaging up above the drop ceiling that was about 7' up, so the packaging went out of sight to anyone coming in to inspect the room. The other store was equally bad, as apparently warehouse staffers who were paid to bring secured merchandise out to customers were bringing more than one of an item out at a time, loading one in the customer's car, then loading the other into their own. This was finally caught on to by a CUSTOMER who saw a worker load a TV into his own car, and asked the store manager about it. Jailtime was the sentence in the latter, but no one was caught in the former.
The only way, in my opinion, to keep this crap from happening is to find a way to only let real managers (ie, not people promoted to manager so that they can be paid a crap salaried wage while working too many hours) have access to the secured merchandise, and to tie their salaries to the sales and inventory results of the secured merchandise. If the store's inventory gets too out-of-whack, the managers get penalized. Technically they could let non-managers in to these spaces, but if their salaries are based on such numbers they'd be much less inclined to let anyone whose salary isn't based on those numbers in to the area.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They actually started shipping to Canada a while ago!
And it's a good thing too. I've consistently found them to be the best.
Tigerdirect used to be my go-to company for everything, but they started screwing up orders and their handling of tracking codes is terrible. It's a good example of how quickly you can lose someones business. I used them for years, probably spend somewhere in the 10000+ range, and it probably only took about 4 months for them to lose my business when newegg came along.
NCIX is ok, but they are _slow_ and really suck at packaging. I've found all manner of weird stuff in boxes from NCIX.. rolls of tape, pages from random printer manuals, other customers order forms! Half the time the box is way too big and it seems like they just shove whatever bits of foam, bubble wrap, paper, and those air pocket things they have laying around (I recently received a box that contain all of those in a big box containing a smaller box containing a server shelf.. which was laying at the bottom of the box!
Ok, I'm gonna stop before I start frothing!
Your comment reminds me of when I worked in a grocery store during high school. We had a "breakage bin" in the back where damaged product went before it was dealt with. Curiously, the "breakage bin" was always half full of cookies and other sweet treats. When the young employees were hungry we would walk down the aisles and find something tasty, "drop" it on the floor, and then snack on it in the back, before tossing it into the bin.
Part of it was being young and stupid, but the crucial bit was that the store didn't have perks or staff discounts for the junior staff. They went through entry-level employees so fast they had no interest in trying to retain them, because there was always another student willing to take his/her place. Thus, for us grunts, ripping off the store went beyond mere feelings of being ignored... it was revenge... and practically a fucking sport.
Ya know, I hate to say this, but at least they were only stealing from the stores. i used to work in a little shop down the street from a Best buy and we were always swamped taking care of the PCs Worst buy "fixed". it was bad enough when we would get floppies put in upside down, hard drives literally beat into the cage because some clueless GS worker didn't know how to release the latch, but i don't know how many time i had to tell folks the reason their PC was slow, or their new graphics card was running like shit was because somebody at Worst Buy palmed it and gave them some shit out of the back if they didn't just rip it straight from the hinges like they'd do with RAM. That was how I met my last GF, I had to tell her the reason her PC was slow after she took it in to get cleaned was because while her PC was supposed to have 1Gb of RAM someone had helped themselves and left her a 256Mb stick in its place.
The bitch is the guy running that BB had to know something was hinky just from all the complaints he got from folks that would call them right from my counter but he made it clear that unless they had some before and after pics or some other proof he didn't give a crap what they or even the label on the side of the PC said, it wasn't his problem. Frankly I really wasn't surprised when they ended up moving to a new location because 'business was down' in that area. No shit, ripping off your customers can have that effect or so I hear.
as for TFA Newegg, Tiger, and Amazon are my three favorite places to shop anymore, never have a bit of hassle, never have a problem. Every time i've tried dealing with local shops I've found piss poor selection, clueless help, and insane prices. With Newegg you can tell pretty easily if something is junky just by the amount of negatives, just look at the rating on some of the Seagate drives for an example. Personally i'd rather shop there than deal with retail hassles, thanks Newegg!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
NewEgg (and to some degree mWave) is the cheapest place to order all the computer parts you need to build your rig. Good selection, fast service, but what makes NewEgg stand out from all the others is 2 things:
a) You can see the 5 star break-down ratings from actual customers
b) You can not only see the total number of reviews, but sort products by "most reviews" AND read each and every mini summary from customers
i.e.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=22&name=AMD-Motherboards&Order=REVIEWS
We see that:
The "ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard", has
avg. 4/5 eggs (stars)
485 customer reviews
Clicking on the eggs we see
5 eggs = 71% (285)
4 eggs = 15% (60)
Which means 86% think this is a great product. Translation: For a high-end AMD system, you can't go wrong with this product!
Before I order anything I _always_ see what is the most popular item AND read the reviews to see if there any issues other builders are having with it. Wouldn't you like to know BEFORE hand if the OEM drivers are buggy?
Buying a product with only 1 star means you are probably buying junk.
Their category organization for finding products is good too.
Hope this helps
Some more photos would have been good...you go all the way to New Jersey and you only took three pictures? That Pick to Light system sounded interesting, but a photo would have made it all clearer.
I thought that this story had already been done, and sure enough, it has. Of course I'm sure Newegg is happy to give a warehouse tour to any blogger who wants one. I'm not even sure the story I linked is the one I've seen before. Wait, maybe that was this one! Anyway, both of those had more photos.
Penny - plain text accounting
I don't agree. There are always people who will attempt to milk the system even when they're happy. I've had a roommate like that.
I won't dispute that less employees will steal, but it certainly won't eliminate the problem.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
IMHO, such businesses ought to have their secured merchandise in a "locked" room (easily circumvented) with a security camera that looks like it was accidentally broken/disabled (e.g. insecurely mounted so it's pointing in the wrong direction). Send new employees back there alone regularly, after hours even.
Next, review video footage from the four hidden cameras and closely check stock over the weekend. Honest employees will never know, and dishonest employees will get weeded out before their first paycheck.
I live in Beijing.
I would love for a similar tour of newegg.com.cn's facilities to be done. Then maybe I could understand why none of the Rosewill (Newegg house brand) products (designed in Taiwan, made in China) can only be bought in the USA and are not available under any circumstances in China.
Or maybe I could understand why products made in China and available in the USA for competitive prices are frequently listed on newegg.com.cn for up to 2x their USA$ price. For USA products that must be shipped back to China, ok, I can understand that... but Lenovo??? Power supplies (with meaningful quality), graphics cards (of reasonable performance- requiring a fan to keep from overheating is a typical breakpoint), and motherboards (that aren't more than 2 years old) cost anywhere from 50% to 200% more than they do in the USA. Only drives (optical/mechanical), CPUs, and RAM are within a 5% premium over USA prices.
And the most fun thing is that as the RMB appreciates (6.3411RMD/1USD this past week, it was 6.75RMB/1USD when I first moved here), none of these products get cheaper in RMB. I get my sister to buy things in the USA and have them shipped here and still save money, unless I need it in a hurry, and then I go to taobao.com for reasonable prices but a much more random user experience.
NewEgg is hardly cheap. There are plenty of cheaper places on the Internet, let alone brick and mortar stores out there that at worst match NewEgg's pricing
....
NewEgg's selection sucks.
ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT.
The grocery store I worked in (20+ years ago) had a sort of "thieves code" instilled by some of the managers, they would openly abuse the breakage bin in-front of the employees, and when a new employee would finally do it in-front of them they were "in the club." Abusing the breakage bin typically consisted of ripping a bag of cookies or similar, taking a few, and sending the rest back to the vendor for credit. After induction to the club, the manager would explain which products could be returned for vendor credit, which couldn't, etc.
Nobody was ever disciplined or fired for abusing the breakage bin, but there were a few fired for other reasons - citing the breakage bin abuse instead of the actual reason for firing.