Inside an Amazon Warehouse

My desk isn't a mess! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 20:08 · Score: 5, Funny

I utilize a chaotic storage system.

Re:My desk isn't a mess! by mrmeval · 2012-11-29 22:19 · Score: 0

I wrote a database to handle chaos storage around 1995. It was written in TAS+ with btrieve as the database. The person storing the stuff would hand enter the location plus checksum and the item code plus checksum as small handheld barcode scanners that would connect wirelessly were too expensive. The software would verify a valid location and item number were entered using the checksum. The database did more than that but it was DOS based and worked well. I quit the company and got a call begging me to go fix it two years after I left. The cheap ass wouldn't pay for half of my new car. ;)

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I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Re:My desk isn't a mess! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 02:03 · Score: 0

I don't understand what your post has to do with Anonymous Coward's desk.
Re:My desk isn't a mess! by hughbar · 2012-11-30 03:26 · Score: 3, Funny
So do many [other?] three year olds. They also use the [probably patented] non-halting ransack method for search:
1. 1. Take something out of the toy box
2. 2. Put it back in somewhere else, if it's not the right thing
3. 3. Go to 1
But I bet Amazon are jealous of that highly advanced method...
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On y va, qui mal y pense!

Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 20:08 · Score: 5, Funny

It sounds like someone needs to run a defrag on those warehouses.

Re:Hmm... by gagol · 2012-11-29 21:09 · Score: 4, Funny

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?

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Tomorrow is another day...
Re:Hmm... by Monoman · 2012-11-30 02:18 · Score: 1

Actually it sounds like the warehouse storage is in a constant state of defrag and deliberately without full file reorder.

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Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Re:Hmm... by Andrewkov · 2012-11-30 03:07 · Score: 1

Bit is it journalled?
Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 03:36 · Score: 0

While funny. Their constraint is storage space. So the system they have makes sense. The computer knows the location and can guide someone to the exact spot they need to be to get an item (if it is not there go back to the computer...). Think Section 3, shelf row Q39, shelf 4, Shelf level 2, section 3. Make sure you scan it, Drop off on conveyor belt 22.
Very easy to teach to someone, very easy to learn. You just better have some good running legs :)
Then putting new stuff on the self is easy. Just dont crush anything or overload the shelf. Make sure you scan it.
'defragging' in this case would actually be a bad thing as they would waste space and create bottlenecks of people and carts (for popular items). I actually wish for my hard drive I could have a 'perfectly fragmented' drive. But the easy way is to just defrag it :)
Used to get more than one box from them when ordering things. Now I see why I have been getting pretty much 1 box lately. Those warehouses are huge!
Re:Hmm... by Bearhouse · 2012-11-30 03:48 · Score: 1

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?
Well, mine are pretty good at fragging theirs...
Re:Hmm... by icebike · 2012-11-30 05:55 · Score: 2

Very easy to teach to someone, very easy to learn. You just better have some good running legs :)

I suspect that they don't run too far.
Seems unlikely they would pick an entire order, just the parts near their station.
Then they plop the tagged bin onto the conveyor which sends all the bins of a given order to a common location for boxing.
I'm guessing they get pick sheets for multiple orders at once (looking at the pictures seems to suggest they are picking into multiple bins in push carts) and the pick sheets are arranged in "elevator seeking" order so they can complete one planned circuit through their area, ending at the conveyor. Rinse Repeat.
As long as the person stocking the floor codes it into the computer correctly, there is little chance of losing anything. They probably arrange things more for the size and shape of the shelving and pick-bins used in a given floor section than anything else. Tiny parts in small drawers. All the books in a given area. Big items somewhere else. Looking at the pictures seems to confirm this.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Re:Hmm... by servant · 2012-12-01 07:49 · Score: 1

They 'do' the same way that UNIX does a defrag. By using increments of storage except for when a physically uber-large item comes in, it will normally not be required.

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... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Re:Hmm... by strikethree · 2012-12-02 11:07 · Score: 2

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?
Yes. I tried for years and years. Then I had an idea which was quite weird. I told him that I do not care about his room, just no biological warfare lab stuff.
So one day, several months later, he asks if some friends can spend the night. I told him, "sure, not a problem."
The next day after his friends leave, he starts cleaning his room religiously and has kept it clean ever since. Why? Because he was embarassed by one of his friends comments on his room.
So simple. I wish I had thought of it earlier. I guess it depends on the friends though. Having a girl come over would have probably had the same effect.

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"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen

May be an interesting slide show... by wvmarle · 2012-11-29 20:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

May be nice if that site works with the latest Firefox, too... been a while since I had an issue with a site just not working.

Re:May be an interesting slide show... by gagol · 2012-11-29 21:12 · Score: 1

Or chromium for that matter. Now it has "business" in its name, developers are probably restricted to ie6 because of their intranet ;-)

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Tomorrow is another day...
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by temcat · 2012-11-29 21:40 · Score: 1

Doesn't work for me in Firefox 16.0.2, but works in Opera 12.10.
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by blagooly · 2012-11-29 22:56 · Score: 1

IE9 fail. Crashed browser page. Twice. An excellent bad example, for the deciders to see. See also Cnet, Wired, The Verge. Good examples? Drudge, Instapundit, reddit. I suspect these companies have too many employees, a culture of change fed by sheer terror, and a long view that extends at least half way to next week.
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by Cinder6 · 2012-11-30 04:42 · Score: 1

Odd. I was just about to say that the slideshow doesn't work in Opera--12.11. Only the first picture shows up.

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If you can't convince them, convict them.
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by Skynyrd · 2012-11-30 04:56 · Score: 1

Since is has a video clip that starts playing automatically, I wasn't there long enough to know that it wouldn't work with Firefox.
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by icebike · 2012-11-30 05:58 · Score: 1

Since is has a video clip that starts playing automatically, I wasn't there long enough to know that it wouldn't work with Firefox.
Actually it wasn't a video clip, that was just a noisy advertisement that happened to appear on the same page. Still Annoying, but it has a mute button.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Re:May be an interesting slide show... by Skynyrd · 2012-12-01 04:44 · Score: 1

Actually it wasn't a video clip, that was just a noisy advertisement that happened to appear on the same page. Still Annoying, but it has a mute button.
There are ads on the Internet? That must be a new thing, as I haven't seen one in years. For precisely this reason.

ADHD girl by girlintraining · 2012-11-29 20:16 · Score: 5, Funny

My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor. So if that's true, instead of expecting me to be a billionaire or the President, my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?

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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie

Re:ADHD girl by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-11-29 20:25 · Score: 5, Funny

Barcodes! You need barcodes!

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The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:ADHD girl by girlintraining · 2012-11-29 20:28 · Score: 4, Funny

Barcodes! You need barcodes!
To breed? Jeez... I knew I was missing something obvious.

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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Re:ADHD girl by jamesh · 2012-11-29 20:44 · Score: 4, Funny

my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?
Just don't breed with a fellow geek or your kids are likely to turn out just like you, only more so. Just like us male geeks should be going for the prettiest, bimboest, bikini babes we can find, you should be going for a handsome jock who prefers grunts to words. Have fun with that ;)
I married for beauty rather than for brains... unfortunately she turned out to be just as geeky as me and as a result my oldest daughter is almost too nerdy to function :)
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:00 · Score: 0

...just breed?
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter! :D
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:14 · Score: 0

Girl your training is going bad. This is not a place to find a breeding mate. Listen your breeding adviser; she knows how to do it.
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:19 · Score: 0

I just need a bar, no code.
Re:ADHD girl by jones_supa · 2012-11-29 21:20 · Score: 4, Funny

My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor.
Correlation is not causation!
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:29 · Score: 2, Funny

Dude, I think you missed the "intraining" part of girlintraining. No problem with the gender identification issue, but girlintraining is never going to bear a child via "natural" means in his/her lifetime without some major advances.
Re:ADHD girl by smittyoneeach · 2012-11-29 21:42 · Score: 2

Has anybody ever told you that you are Secretary of State material?

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Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:51 · Score: 0

gee - are you blonde, 36-24-36 material ? :D
Re:ADHD girl by flyingfsck · 2012-11-29 21:52 · Score: 5, Funny

You mean Bracodes...

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Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:53 · Score: 0

Randomness of locations isn't a problem as long as you make a database or a hashtable so you can quickly find things. If you have actually implemented a hashtable to document the locations of your belongings (which would be easier with barcodes or RFID chips), then yes you should consider becoming a retail vendor, or at least working for a company to optimize their logistics.
Okay, what I just said isn't 100% true. For an actual warehouse or dirty bedroom, you will still want to have some optimization algorithms to make the physical effort of reaching high demand items the lowest possible value (i.e. keep the Justin Bieber CDs next to the shipping area or your CD player*).
* Just kidding, I hope
Re:ADHD girl by jamesh · 2012-11-29 21:58 · Score: 1

Dude, I think you missed the "intraining" part of girlintraining. No problem with the gender identification issue, but girlintraining is never going to bear a child via "natural" means in his/her lifetime without some major advances.
Didn't notice the username. I assumed the reference to a bra implied breasts which in turn implied the rest of the required biological capacity to bear children.
Re:ADHD girl by sa1lnr · 2012-11-29 22:00 · Score: 4, Funny

Oh man, little do you know.
There's a veritable minefield of codes to navigate when it comes to women. :)
Re:ADHD girl by silentcoder · 2012-11-29 22:53 · Score: 3, Funny

Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...

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Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Re:ADHD girl by somersault · 2012-11-30 00:24 · Score: 1

If you have actually implemented a hashtable to document the locations of your belongings
I have, it's called my memory. Of course if the data isn't refreshed every so often, it can become corrupt.

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which is totally what she said
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 00:46 · Score: 0

Dude, I think you missed the "intraining" part of girlintraining. No problem with the gender identification issue, but girlintraining is never going to bear a child via "natural" means in his/her lifetime without some major advances.
Didn't notice the username. I assumed the reference to a bra implied breasts which in turn implied the rest of the required biological capacity to bear children.
That would be intrainer.
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 00:54 · Score: 0

Girl your training is going bad. This is not a place to find a breeding mate. Listen your breeding adviser; she knows how to do it.
Here the advice can be breeding awful.
Re: ADHD girl by Dupple · 2012-11-30 01:01 · Score: 1

Bra codes you fool!

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Watch those corners
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 04:46 · Score: 0

Bracodes?
Re:ADHD girl by Frosty+Piss · 2012-11-30 05:23 · Score: 2

Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...
Only if you're gay, otherwise adapter plug not needed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 07:48 · Score: 2

Umm, read her profile. She is naturally a she. She just likes girls. Which means she can bear natural children, if she chooses.
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 09:57 · Score: 0

That's funny. Would you like a glass of wine?
Re:ADHD girl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 12:11 · Score: 0

Hi guys! I'm a girl on the internet, teehee!
Re:ADHD girl by servant · 2012-12-01 07:50 · Score: 1

I think that is what Amazon is doing with their facilities, as fast as they are 'reproducing'.

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... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Re:ADHD girl by strikethree · 2012-12-02 11:09 · Score: 1

Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...
Hm. You do realize that the male has the proper plug and the female has the proper receptacle... right? ;)

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"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen

Walmart do the same by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 20:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

If you've ever worked at Wallmart or I guess any of the other major supermarkets, they do the same thing. Store stuff whereever and track where it is. So it might be organized on the computer, but in the storerooms its real-world location bears no relation to it's computerized structure.

Again for the same reason, seasonality and holidays etc. mean the sales are not constants and stocks of different items vary, and with small space at the supermarket for storage, it doesn't make sense to dedicate empty space to storing *potential* stuff.

But hey, perhaps Bezo's plans to patent it, like one click ordering. So he's pretending it's a new thing.

Re:Walmart do the same by ranton · 2012-11-30 05:49 · Score: 1

Things must have changed in the last 8 years, because when I worked at Walmart theyhad sections of storage that correlated with departments in the building. If I was restocking the Sporting Goods department, I went to the Sporting Goods section of the docking area. These sections could shrink or grow a little based on need, but they were always in the same general area.
Did you mean this is how Walmart distribution centers work? Or was the store I worked at uncommon for Walmart Supercenters?

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-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Re:Walmart do the same by servant · 2012-12-01 07:58 · Score: 1

WMT and others are doing JIT (Just In Time) inventory. They don't get stock delivered till it is needed, except for a few seasons where they must stock up ahead of time like Black Friday and Holiday shopping (I think that is why the local WMT here breed 40' storage containers over part of their parking lots). Manufacturers do the same thing with raw stock. And like retailers, the manufacturers that do JIT inventory get caught without raw inventory when it happens sometimes in their supply chain, but seldom get caught with much excess inventory.
If WMT and Amazon are doing it, I am guessing it makes them $$.

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... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Re:Walmart do the same by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-01 13:40 · Score: 0

Way back in 1994 I saw this at a CAT (Caterpillar) plant. I walked in and saw no people but automated fork trucks where moving back and forth to automated storage shelves (big stuff). I asked my host "there are no labels on any on the shelves" to which he said the computers use geo to track where the RF tagged widgets are. Pretty cool for back then.

FOSS Inventory management recomendations by yurik · 2012-11-29 20:19 · Score: 0

A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.

Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.

Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by girlintraining · 2012-11-29 20:25 · Score: 1

A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes...Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.
Have you given Bundy a try?

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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by yurik · 2012-11-29 20:32 · Score: 1

Could you give a link? I couldn't find it. Thanks!
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by damnbunni · 2012-11-29 20:52 · Score: 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Bundy
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by jones_supa · 2012-11-29 21:24 · Score: 1

A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.
I don't see what your friend would benefit from open source in this case. How about Microsoft Dynamics NAV?
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:40 · Score: 0

Could you give a link? I couldn't find it. Thanks!
http://www.bundabergrum.com.au/ but you might find it makes you break out in handcuffs.
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by peragrin · 2012-11-29 23:31 · Score: 1

are you trying to rive them insane.
It is a horrible product if your trying to run a company from it. it's idea of Point of Sale is a piece of shit.
let alone the inventory management sucks
oh and the accounting end is ass backwards. we end up doing everything twice simply because that is how the system was designed.
Microsoft products with the quality and abilities to squirt to brown bricks of uselessness.
He needs to break down and get a real POS/Inventory system.

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i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations by ixidor · 2012-11-30 06:02 · Score: 1

i work with a Florist with 10+ items in inventory, this is the reason they use peachtree ( now sage 50 something ) over QuickBooks..

Humans? by DNS-and-BIND · 2012-11-29 20:21 · Score: 2

So, Amazon is refusing to invest in robots to do this repetitive work? Instead, they employ humans to perform mind-numbing running all over the place to fetch products and fill shipping boxes. Don't you think a company of Amazon's size should spend some of those billions on some modern industrial robots so that the humans can get a rest?

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Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!

Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 20:32 · Score: 0

So, Amazon is refusing to invest in robots to do this repetitive work? Instead, they employ humans to perform mind-numbing running all over the place to fetch products and fill shipping boxes. Don't you think a company of Amazon's size should spend some of those billions on some modern industrial robots so that the humans can get a rest?
Ah,
why invest in robots when you can pay agencies ££ to hire your staff for you, and then pay the poor sods doing the product 'fulfilment' a pittance and both the Amazon and agency staff get to treat these poor sods like shit?
The great thing about meatbags, you can hire'n'fire them quite easily.
Re:Humans? by Ozeroc · 2012-11-29 20:47 · Score: 5, Informative

Yeah, I've read that fulfulment warehouses are a terrible place to work: http://www.alternet.org/story/154344/what_happened_when_i_got_a_job_at_a_soul-crushing%2C_abusive_warehouse

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Re:Humans? by TheLink · 2012-11-29 20:51 · Score: 5, Informative

Not true. They bought Kiva. It probably takes a while before they work out the changes needed and roll that out.

As for humans getting rest, in many countries if you end up without a job and are not in the "ruling caste" the rest of the people don't seem to think you deserve to get any $$$$ for "resting" aka "doing nothing productive".

Careful for what you ask for, you may get it.
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- Too many replies beneath your current threshold
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:19 · Score: 0

I worked fulfilment for a while in a Scottish plant. If you go at it with the right mindset it's quite good fun (it's almost video-gamey). Lots of folk hated it too, though.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-29 21:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

As others have noted, Amazon purchased Zappos which utilizes Kiva in their warehouses. I expect Amazon to adapt Zappos models more than Amazon to migrate Zappos to their model. Every time a robot/computer replaces a human (been going on for 40 years), the fractional replacement human is a high skilled person than the multiple people they replaced. Think stocking -- the programmer costs a lot more and requires a lot more education than the human picker -- but the programmer's work can be deployed without limitations to service 6 billion people (and more later).

The first world societies have to understand real soon that they need to figure out what to do with the jobless masses with IQs under 110 in fifty years. The answer can't be "pay them to breed more crack babies", the answer has to be "each generation values breeding less and eduction more" - or expect their economy to sink under the economic sea like most of the PIGS probably will.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-29 21:43 · Score: 1

Exactly why they should be replaced with computers and robots as much as possible. Then the workers can go on welfare (or, actually teach their brood that education is the MOST important thing and hope their kids will support them in their old age and stop creating more offspring).

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-29 21:45 · Score: 1

(Replying to my own post - I know, poor form!)

And, of course, Amazon eventually acquired Kiva which is a strong hint that what I said in my post is likely to be their goal.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by Coriolis · 2012-11-29 22:03 · Score: 2

Or you could actually read the article that link points to and discover that your prejudices are incorrect. Educated people end up in these jobs too.

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Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
Re:Humans? by silentcoder · 2012-11-29 22:57 · Score: 1

>Don't you think a company of Amazon's size should spend some of those billions on some modern industrial robots so that the humans can get a rest?
How many humans whose last job was "stacked boxes in a wharehouse" would be able to feed themselves and their families if they did that ?
It may or may not make business sense - but pretending that mass layoffs is somehow humanitarian is a new level of low.

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Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Re:Humans? by DarkOx · 2012-11-30 00:11 · Score: 1

No, because then you'd be angry at them for killing jobs. Everyone knows that big companies will be vilified no matter what they do. So it really only makes sense for them to do whatever is most economical.
If the general public actually had the intellect to rival our poo flinging primate cousins; than maybe there would be hope for corporate responsibility but as it stands companies like Amazon and lately even Google can't be win in the court of public opinion no matter what they do so they may as well just "be evil".

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Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Re:Humans? by DarkOx · 2012-11-30 00:26 · Score: 1

Easy, get rid of the earned income tax credit and make failure to file and or pay a capital crime for persons over 18. We have just have them all lined up an shot on April 16th. It will even broaden the base!
Seriously though it is a real problem and there is a total leadership vacuum around the issue. The whole "winning the future" thing misses the point. We can invest all we want in education but there is still going to be an ever growing segment of the population who simply lack the innate talent to be more productive than our machines. It won't matter how many years we send trying to cram their wetware full of facts and condition it to use certain problem solving strategies.
Honestly I think this is real problem society faces and its manifesting it self in ways that we are treating like problems today; which are really only symptoms. Its like the myth of pay gap. Its not that CEO has become more greedy in fact if you look at total cost of compensation, including perks and expense, CEO pay vs other employees has actually gone DOWN over 25 years. Its just that the average wage has spread. Why because machines replaced the bottom rung of white collar workers first.
Those workers made more than blue collar folks because you did have to have some training to do basic accounting work. Now the ERP system and handful of accountants does the work a whole department once did on paper. The robots have actually been the harder part of automation.
Doing what carbon paper and an adding machine did with automation was easy, replicating the human hand much harder, but that domino is falling. When people are not needed to stock shelves or fry burgers we are in real trouble. Really I anticipate cleaning the last thing to be automated.

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Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 00:27 · Score: 0

Rest? You mean unemployed
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:03 · Score: 1

I worked fulfilment for a while in a Scottish plant. If you go at it with the right mindset it's quite good fun (it's almost video-gamey). Lots of folk hated it too, though.
Bonded or blended Scottish?
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:18 · Score: 3, Interesting

I have worked at such a warehouse as christmas reinforcement, and can confirm the soul-crushingness of the job. The only reason I took it was I was in a spot where it was either take a last-minute job, or lose my apartment. The work is grueling, brainless, and people will hate you for every little fuckup that happens because it holds up the line. The routine is: Grab a bin from the conveyor belt, find the entries on the included list that are located in your division, put labels on them, put them in the bin, and send it on its way. For 12 hours a day. Nobody talks to anybody. It's not that they're bad people, it's just that there's no room for any sort of socializing, or anything that would help boost morale. The hallways and bathrooms are covered in motivational and anti-alcohol/drug posters. I know I'd drink if that were my full-time job.
My paycheck at the end of the month ended up covering half my rent. Entirely unlivable, and definitely a job that should and could be done 95% by robots. Luckily I ended up getting a job the next month that paid nearly 5x that.
capcha: merchant
Re:Humans? by SirGarlon · 2012-11-30 01:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

The first world societies have to understand real soon that they need to figure out what to do with the jobless masses with IQs under 110 in fifty years.
Well, the problem of "masses" is taking care of itself. No need for government policy there; market forces are driving population growth down.
As to the "IQ under 110," there are lots of productive and necessary jobs that can't easily be automated. It's going to be a long time before a robot can cook a gourmet meal or repair a leaky faucet or give me a good haircut.
One doesn't need to be educated or even terribly smart to be a productive member of society. One just needs a work ethic.

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[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 02:19 · Score: 0

And cooking and plumbing, doing it above marginal, takes intelligence. Don't know about barbers.
Re:Humans? by FreelanceWizard · 2012-11-30 02:19 · Score: 1

They don't have to be. One approach is to create high churn through abusive behavior and unreasonable KPIs; this works if you don't really care that much about error rates and don't need your personnel to be able to do more complicated tasks besides "pick, pack, ship." On the other hand, at my company (we do aviation fulfillment), our warehouse personnel are paid well, given reasonable KPIs, and treated well, and so our churn is extremely low. I believe this year our warehouse churn has been 0%, and it's historically around 1% or so. The advantage of this approach is that you have better quality control and personnel who can competently handle things like dangerous goods. Perhaps most importantly to us is that you don't have to have the obsessive security most fulfillment warehouses have, which ultimately saves money. Funny enough, when you treat your personnel well, you don't have to worry about them stealing from you.

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The Freelance Wizard
Re:Humans? by misexistentialist · 2012-11-30 02:25 · Score: 1

Assembling thousands of identical servings or performing thousands of haircuts to certain specifications seem like great jobs for robots. And it took a plumber 3 calls to repair a problematic faucet in my bathtub, a hugely inefficient process, so clearly a standard robot-swappable module should be developed. Certainly if work ethic is what matters, robot is your man!
Re:Humans? by Toze · 2012-11-30 03:17 · Score: 1

Someone hasn't been paying attention to demographics over time; first-world nations have negative birth rates (I think that's the term; replacement rates lower than 1:1). Third-world nations that get a boost in living conditions have slowing birth rates (usually takes a generation and change for birth rate reduction to catch up with infant mortality reduction, iirc). America and Canada and suchlike have population growth primarily from immigration, but they need to keep importing immigrants because the children of immigrants have the same first-world negative birth rates.
IOW, first world societies don't, really, have to understand what to do with jobless masses. They're going to lack masses to be jobless with. They might have to be concerned with losing culture wars against populous third-world (or recently post-third-world) nations, but "how do we pay for old age pensions when our workforce is 3/4 the size it used to be and retirees are twice as common?" is more likely to be a problem than "oh man what do we do with all these workers." Demographically speaking, that is.

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No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Re:Humans? by cstream_chris · 2012-11-30 03:39 · Score: 1

Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing. Gives a new perspective to clicking "place order." For others, here's the link w/o all the page jumps: http://www.alternet.org/print/story/154344/what_happened_when_i_got_a_job_at_a_soul-crushing%2C_abusive_warehouse
Re:Humans? by Bearhouse · 2012-11-30 03:56 · Score: 1

I'm all for using technology to replace people in dangerous, hard, boring and/or repetitive work.
Humans should be prepared by their parents, and society, to be able to earn a decent living in fulfilling roles.
BUT
Many of them, sadly, are not. Working in a warehouse is hard, (I've done it), but at least you're inside, and it's better to have a job than not have one.
Not just from a financial aspect, but more importantly from a social one.
Keep the robots for the really dangerous stuff, and keep job opportunities open for people who cannot aspire to better in the short term, (you can start in the warehouse, and then move to the front office)
Re:Humans? by Apharmd · 2012-11-30 04:14 · Score: 0

In my mid-20s, before I went back to college, I worked in a grocery chain's fulfillment warehouse. The conditions were absolutely inhuman, it was a back-breaking job. Management made it worse by re-timing all of the performance goals to lower our pay. You had 8 seconds per location for picking and a short amount of travel time in between. That 8 seconds might be a few cases of toilet paper, or 250lbs of dog food. Then they would do things like trot out a "ringer", generally a long-time employee who had been promoted past picking to something higher-paying such as forklift operator. Then they would have this ringer do cherry-picked routes for a day, post the list of the week's performers, and claim that the rest of us weren't working hard enough. I know people who worked in Amazon's warehouse. The conditions there are just as bad if not worse. Oh, and get injured (not unlikely given just how physical the job is, and the long hours)? Get a lawyer, if you can afford it. Amazon will go to any length to fire you before they see you collect a dime in worker's comp. When you see Amazon's market share grow and grow, remember that it does so on the mistreatment of others. They should find another job? Not likely. These warehouses are usually placed in rural or disadvantaged areas where there are few employers.
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 04:35 · Score: 1

It's going to be a long time before a robot can cook a gourmet meal or repair a leaky faucet or give me a good haircut.
I'd rather not have someone with an IQ of less than 110 do any of those things...
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 04:52 · Score: 1

Why not? 100 is average - you think that the average human being can't figure out how to cook? Or fix a faucet? Or cut your hair?
These are all specialized things that can be done well even by people who are developmentally disabled, if given proper training.
Re:Humans? by Applekid · 2012-11-30 05:13 · Score: 2

And people point to worker conditions in China about slave wages, long hours, and suicidal tenancies. Compared to Amazon warehouses, though, these Chinese workers get lots more money working at some horrible factory in Guandong than their peers, while in the US, the pay still can't sustain a living.
Yet hedge fund managers...

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More Twoson than Cupertino
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 05:36 · Score: 1

As to the "IQ under 110," there are lots of productive and necessary jobs that can't easily be automated. It's going to be a long time before a robot can cook a gourmet meal or repair a leaky faucet or give me a good haircut.
One doesn't need to be educated or even terribly smart to be a productive member of society. One just needs a work ethic.
That holds for the individual, but it doesn't scale to the macro level. Demand for factory workers and other 'human robots' is falling faster than demand for extra haircuts and meals are rising. No amount of work ethic will fit 30 million unskilled laborers into 10 million service jobs. The job examples you chose: fileting meat, manipulating hair, unclogging shit-- these are all jobs where human hands are still more dextrous than robots, but there's no guarantee that that will remain the case.
The 'middle class' is an historical anomaly. The industrial revolution gave people a means to add unprecedented value to society by using their hands. Those jobs are vanishing. There are 12 million commercial drivers in the US. Driving a truck or a taxi has been a reliable stepping stone to the middle class for 80 years, highly accessible to fresh-off-the-farm and fresh-off-the-boat workers. In the next years, self-driving cars are going to eliminate 90% of those jobs. What are those people going to do?
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 05:37 · Score: 0

Sorry, I call Bullshit.
First, "12 hours a day"? That would qualify you for overtime.
Second, Your monthly paycheck covered "half" your rent? Lets see- $7.25 (federal min wage) * 40 hours per week, times 4 weeks = $1160. So, your rent is $2300+ ???
(Oh, that's a lowball estimate. If you're working 5 12 hour days, it'd be $1740 a month for a whopping $3480 a month rent.)
Now, don't get me wrong- I'm sure the work is not fun. Else it wouldn't be 'work'. But you don't need to exaggerate.
Re:Humans? by akb · 2012-11-30 05:44 · Score: 2

This article about what it was like at an Amazon fulfillment center in PA. Backbreaking work with ever increasing demands topped off with many workers passing out from heatstroke. Inside Amazon's Warehouse: Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer
Re:Humans? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 05:45 · Score: 0

Oh, and according to that Alternet story posted a few levels above, the author "got hired at elevensomething dollars an hour".
$11 per hours would mean 11 * 40 * 4 = $1760 per month, or a Monthly rent of $3500+.
At 12 hours days, that'd be $2640 per month, for a monthly rent of $5280.
That BS smell is getting stronger.
Re:Humans? by meta-monkey · 2012-11-30 06:24 · Score: 1

Doing what carbon paper and an adding machine did with automation was easy, replicating the human hand much harder, but that domino is falling. When people are not needed to stock shelves or fry burgers we are in real trouble. Really I anticipate cleaning the last thing to be automated.
Google's self driving car is going unemploy an awful lot of people. No taxi cab drivers, bus drivers, truckers (except of the ice road variety, perhaps), UPS drivers, pizza delivery boys...
And IBM's Watson is going to knock up Siri, and their progeny will replace doctors, research lawyers, and other knowledge workers.

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We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-30 06:45 · Score: 1

Unfortunately the more educated people are, the fewer children they are having in the US. The more educated the parents are, the more likely their children are to become well educated as well. The birthrate among the less educated is much closer to replacement rate and in some demographics exceeds it substantially. The children of the less educated are less likely to be well educated so the jobs they are more likely to have (such as picking packages @ Amazon or asking "would you like fries with that" under the golden arches) are the very ones that are going away at the fastest pace. I agree that well educated (in a practical field - an education in Women's Studies likely isn't going to help much), intelligent, and hard working people in the US will have little problem getting jobs (albeit not, perhaps, at the take-home pay level they would like) for the foreseeable future.

While it's possible that the US will manage to change the culture to encourage hard work and eduction from kindergarten on and to get most people to believe that education is the key to success and that success is important, I'm not hopeful looking at the current crop of elementary, middle, and high school students. Too many of these students haven't been trained to "own" their answer. For example, I commonly observe students asking "is this right?" after putting down what they eventually admit was just a guess (and, not a well educated one at that!) - a question that I rarely heard when I was in school just a few decades ago - the more likely question then was "I don't understand this, can you explain how to do this?" Too many of these students also are unwilling to work hard and have been trained to work in groups where no one individual is responsible for solving the problem correctly (when I ask them if since they don't want to work individually on problems do they mind sharing one paycheck amongst the group when they get a job, they don't think much of that idea of course). As well, there is far to much rewarding for "showing up" and too little for true achievement - everyone gets a trophy for something (pro-tip kids: I have a relatively fixed raise pool and it goes to those who perform the best and I willingly get rid of those that I can replace with a more productive developer - no trophies for showing up, that's just a requirement). It's unlikely as these kids move on to minimum wage jobs and begin to have their own children within a few years that many of them are suddenly going to see the light of the folly of their ways and push their children to study hard. Indeed, it appears parents of the current generation of children in this class often seem to fear that their child will be "smarter" than they are (perhaps as a defensive reaction to their poor performance) so fail to encourage education.

The saying that "A managers hire A workers but B managers hire C workers" seems to apply to parenting also.

While the US has been a magnet for immigration for many years, I anticipate that will slow quite dramatically over the next 50 years for a variety of reasons. First, the alternatives for educated citizens of other countries, esp. India and China, are increasingly attractive in their native countries as their population moves up the economic ladder and increases their standard of living. Second is related to the very problem you mention - there will be too few young workers to support the retirees in the US which will make the US economy weaker and require raising taxes on every level of worker which will make the US a bit less attractive than "staying home" (the view that the US can just tax the wealthy decade after decade to "solve" the shortfall is, IMHO, a fantasy). Third, as the job market gets tighter in the US for the less well educated, the calls for protectionism and clamping down on both legal and illegal immigration (responding to the populace's cries of "immigrants take our jobs" and "foreign worker's products are undercutting ours and taking our jobs") will begin to echo from both sides of the aisles in Congress.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-30 06:52 · Score: 1

Google's self driving car is going unemploy an awful lot of people.
Although they may increase employment in body shops until the "last bug" is fixed.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by Apharmd · 2012-11-30 07:02 · Score: 0

You are missing the point, which is that working conditions don't have to be this bad. It wouldn't hurt the bottom line too much to treat the employees humanely, to not be constantly understaffed, to provide proper ergonomics, fair pay, good benefits, and to promote safety. For the rest of it, fuck you.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-30 07:28 · Score: 1

Actually, the plumbing example is interesting. There is a strong focus on reducing the labor required to do plumbing work - esp. in new construction and remodeling.

Compare waste pipes in a new house of today to those of 50 years ago. 50 years ago they were cast iron and required cutting and hot lead sealing at joints - very labor intensive. Now, they are plastic which is much faster to cut, actually bends a little (okay, who hasn't done this just a bit although it's not good form), is lighter to carry (less labor), and joints are glued with a few seconds of work. As a result, much less labor is required to achieve the same result. And it's gravy that the pipes never rust so probably never require replacement and the associated labor, have a low coefficient of friction reducing blockages and the associated labor, and require less labor to repair if damaged or to retrofit during remodeling.

Compare water supply lines in a new house of today to those of 50 years ago. 50 years ago they were likely galvanized which is labor intensive to install (heavy, each joint needs to be cut, threaded, and tightened properly and if it leaks during test, replacing it is time consuming) and didn't last all that long (water conditions in some areas resulted in galvanized piping needing replacing in just a few decades - requiring yet more labor). Now, the piping is likely to be PEX which can eliminate virtually all joints (if run from a central manifold(s) directly to each fixture), much of the measuring, and is light -- dramatically reducing installation labor. PEX also is more tolerant of freezing so in climates where that's important, there's potentially less repair required. Also, if using a central manifold with valves and a run to each fixture, many plumbing problems can be isolated by the homeowner and eliminate the need for an "emergency" plumbing call.

Compare quality faucets of 50 years ago to those of today. New materials and designs make the requirement to change washers frequently a thing of the past. When the cartridge eventually needs replacing, it's about when the seat of 50 years ago would have required resurfacing so even the "cartridge drop in", albeit more labor intensive than replacing a washer, replaces an even more labor intensive operation.

It is true there have been some offsetting changes - such as some local codes requiring fire sprinklers (thankfully) which require plumbing skills for installation and, at least for a time, increasing house sizes w/more fixtures per occupant, these don't offset the reduced labor by the new materials which are produced in mass production environments with very low labor content.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
Re:Humans? by meta-monkey · 2012-11-30 07:33 · Score: 1

Humans are buggier than robots, so immediately after adoption body shop business will decrease, but body shops will not be eliminated until the last bug is found.

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We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Re:Humans? by uncqual · 2012-11-30 08:22 · Score: 1

I'm worried about the transition period where the stupid humans are sharing the road with self-driving vehicles running release X for all X < 6. Even with decades of intuitive understanding of humans, the stupidity of human drivers still amazes me. I figure release 1.0 will handle other sane drivers on the road pretty well, but am thinking the insane ones interacting with the self-driving vehicles may increase collisions.

I'm also wondering how good the self-driving vehicles will be at detecting human cues like eye contact and a subtle wave of someone's hand indicating they are letting you merge in front of them. If the self driving cars can't pick up on these cues, it seems they will likely get themselves into "can't get out of here" boxes and/or confuse other human drivers by ignoring or interpreting their behavior incorrectly.

For example, I'm curious how they will merge onto a freeway with fairly heavy traffic moving at high speed when visibility is limited and the merge lane is short and on the inside of a slight curve in the freeway.

There was such a merge situation I used to do almost daily (thank you state highway department that thought there should be vegetation hiding the merging and mainline traffic from each other until the last second just to make it a bit more challenging - idiots). Enough people drove this stretch every day that it all sort of worked out because some kind/attentive soul on the freeway would detect your predicament and slow a bit and wave you in.

However, I'm pretty sure the only "safe" thing, in the absence of human cues, to do was to come to a complete stop on the on-ramp about 20 percent of the time because, technically, there just wasn't any safe way to merge "by the book" leaving proper clearances. Of course doing so would have been a disaster as (1) it would then have been impossible to merge into traffic (at least without a Highway Patrol rolling road block or a phalanx of self-drivers conspiring to do effectively the same thing) for up to two hours until traffic dropped and (2) you would likely be rear-ended by a car behind you on the on-ramp whose driver is paying more attention to the instant they can begin to see around the vegetation than they were to the car in front of them on the ramp.

My guess is the lawyers would tell the programmers to select the "Stop" option in spite of the societal cost (an unnecessary accident and/or an unusable on-ramp for a couple hours) because in court they could prove based on the speed of other cars and gaps, there was no safe way to merge and stopping was the only safe option and that any collision was the result of the driver behind not paying attention. By attempting the merge (possibly misreading some cue), an accident might occur on the freeway and the records on the self driving car would PROVE that the merge was unsafe.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.

Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Twinbee · 2012-11-29 20:23 · Score: 1

We could learn off Amazon for our own computer file systems. A metadata/database filesystem where everything is stored all in one folder (rather than organized into directories) would save everyone so much time. The barcode would be replaced by 'tags' or metadata. Popular and recent tags could be accessible via a dropdown. Hunting for files, reorganization, deciding where to store files, becomes suddenly much easier.

More info:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/filesystem.html
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/01/19/filesystem_sacrilege/
http://dbfs.sourceforge.net/

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Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc

Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-11-29 20:30 · Score: 2

Why do that, when you can have an organized directory structure and searchable file tags? The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.

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The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:15 · Score: 0

I was thinking WAFL when I read the description.
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Twinbee · 2012-11-29 21:16 · Score: 1

As others have said before, you can emulate folders with a metadata system anyway. Having actual folders on TOP of that is a kludge.

Besides that minor issue, Microsoft isn't exactly encouraging people to use virtual folders (and do third-party programs allow you to save metadata when saving files?). Does it utilize a realtime filterable window like Everything, where you can search for something in an instant based on the metadata they contain? I very much doubt it. That's a vital part of the tech if a metadata system is to become standard.

I was thinking of something which was designed completely from the ground up to fully support a metadata filesystem, and where actual folders were an 'extra' if implemented at all (since they can be emulated perfectly). Explorer windows become extinct and are replaced by a powerful filterable window which lists any and all files in realtime.

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Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by JaredOfEuropa · 2012-11-29 21:56 · Score: 2

It works for email. I get rather a lot of it and I have stopped filing it in neat little folders; instead all mail goes into an "archive" folder. Some time management methods like GTD recommend this: do not waste too much time on filing stuff, just throw it on the pile and rely on search to find it later.

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If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by zyzko · 2012-11-29 23:06 · Score: 1

Well, the company I work for does just that (I won't mention the name but it is easy enough to find...) minus the realtime filtering (we kind of have that on some properties but not the way Everything does it, at least not yet) - you have to click the search button to get filtered results (it searches metadata and file contents, quick search) or you can build your own search down to the very finest specification and these can be saved as views, and everything (including permissions!) are driven by the metadata. We have "traditional folder" support built on top of that for scenarios where a program expects a traditional folder structure (several CAD / CAM software do require this).
To the application this is completely transparent, it just sees a drive letter and saving and opening works nicely, our filesystem driver provides paths to files so that applications don't need to be aware that they are not working with a traditional filesystem. It is actually pretty neat and allows modeling of real-world structures intuitively, not just files. For an example if your document is related to a customer you soon end up modeling the customers as separate objects, and bam, there you got yourself a lightweight CRM system out of the box...
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 23:10 · Score: 1

One could implement a metadata/tagging based filesystem, and still be compatible with legacy apps which expect filenames and folders. Save a file to: "/images/me/2012-11-20/peanuts.jpg", and you extract the tags/labels from the path: "images", "me", "2012-11-20" and "peanuts".
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Twinbee · 2012-11-29 23:49 · Score: 1

Sounds great. Did your company build the filesystem or did you get it off the shelf?

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Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by zyzko · 2012-11-29 23:53 · Score: 1

It is completely in-house project. We have various parts that are off the self components in the product like OCR and a few other pieces but the filesystem stuff is 100% our code.
Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:16 · Score: 0

For an example if your document is related to a customer you soon end up modeling the customers as separate objects, and bam, there you got yourself a lightweight CRM system out of the box...
Object Oriented customer models : a small copy of the real thing?
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Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... by qzzpjs · 2012-11-30 03:48 · Score: 0

There is an order to the folders but not to tags. In your example, there would be no difference between the paths /images/me/2012-11-20 and me/2012-11-20/images or me/images/2012-11-20.
If you add a parent/child relationship to your tags, you might as well just stick with folders. Typically, file name extensions could be used as a simple tagging system for searches. We just need smarter apps that don't tie their data files to particular extensions.

... yeah, real nice. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 20:29 · Score: 2, Informative

Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2017901782_amazonwarehouse04.html

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

Re:... yeah, real nice. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 07:34 · Score: 0

I recently left working at an Amazon warehouse as a "picker", which is basically pushing a cart full of bins through the aisles and scanning in items off the shelves. Despite the shift being 10 hrs long, the rate you were expected to "pick" at-- 140 units/hr-- was not difficult to achieve at all; I (and most folks!) would usually make rate with two hours left in the day, because the only number Amazon cares about is reaching 1400 units in a day.
140 units/hr may sound like a lot of work and moving, it really isn't difficult to achieve because the systems assign "flow paths" that are optimized for picking multiple items in an aisle, and in every aisle there are usually multiple picks of the same item. Teachers order 35 items for their class, libraries purchase multiple copies of books, a handyman needs a dozen wall mounting brackets for the construction project he's working on at home, etc. Don't forget new releases for video games, DVDs, books-- When Halo's latest sequel came out, I reached my 1400 items before lunch for the entire week.
I realize that there were many more positions than the one I had, and every warehouse is different, but with regards to work environment, workload, and the living wage paid to employees (which is MUCH higher than unskilled labor usually gets), the job was easy and worth it. Super easy. In two weeks your feet stop hurting and your muscles get used to the repetitive motions, so unless you're unfit for walking 8-10 miles a day, the only complainers are the lazy ones who, as it turned out, got fired from their last job because they were slow, talked back to the boss, or were otherwise unproductive.
The job is not glamorous, and certainly got a little lonely with smalltalk usually limited to a "Hello" or "Excuse me", but you know what? Sure as hell beats the rates that were expected in the Chinese and Mexican fulfillment centers, which started at 220 units/hour with no AC, crappy equipment, rickety shelves, and god knows what else.
I've worked in warehouses and factories off and on for 15 years as I worked through multiple college degrees and training, and Amazon is a cakewalk--- partly because of things described in the actual article, which people seem to have gotten off topic from. I sympathize with those who know how shitty these jobs can be-- I really do-- but at the risk of sounding like some corporate schill, Amazon isn't like what AP is claiming.

Re:Sounds similar to a certain internet by tebee · 2012-11-29 20:48 · Score: 1

Don't we have something called the world wide web that's a bit like that now?

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Humans vs. Robots by gentryx · 2012-11-29 20:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

Chaotic storage works because the barcode of each shelved item is scanned together with the barcode of its shelve, so that the computer can later on tell the humans where to find the stuff for a certain order.

Apparently there is no reason why this wouldn't work with robots. Apparently robots are still to expensive or not smart (in terms of physical skills) enough.I wonder when we'll see Amazon experimenting with robots.

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Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp

Re:Humans vs. Robots by wvmarle · 2012-11-29 21:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's likely mostly the physical skill of opening a wrapper and taking a book out of it. Or worse, some odd shaped item. That's stuck in the tight wrapper.
The first (and only photo visible to me) on that that site showed a bunch of shipping pallets aligned haphazardly with cartons stacked on top of them. Assuming one item per pallet, you go find the pallet (easy), then find which carton is currently open already (harder), then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part), and place it in your shopping trolley or whatever they use there (easy again).
Finding and scanning bar codes may also be tricky, as they're likely not on fixed locations.
Current robots work where a blind man could work. They are as good as blind, after all. And need to know exactly where to find a product, and how to take one and only one. That's not easy with all those odd shaped, and constantly changing products.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:29 · Score: 0

That depends on the goods you're trying to handle. If they are big enough - pallets, for example - you just need a forklift truck with a guidance system thats plugged into a database. I worked for a company that did the database part of such systems back in 1995.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by ByteSlicer · 2012-11-30 00:31 · Score: 1

They sure seem to be treating humans as robots already. And yes, the humans are cheaper to operate.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 00:50 · Score: 1

One disadvantage of robots is that they don't scale as well as humans, they work at full speed the whole time. During busy periods it is more cost effective for Amazon to add more warehouse workers and get more throughput than to try to add more robots that aren't needed for most of the time
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:21 · Score: 0

Chaotic storage works because the barcode of each shelved item is scanned together with the barcode of its shelve, so that the computer can later on tell the humans where to find the stuff for a certain order.
Apparently there is no reason why this wouldn't work with robots. Apparently robots are still to expensive or not smart (in terms of physical skills) enough.I wonder when we'll see Amazon experimenting with robots.
Would a Kindle be an interesting controler for an industrial robot? I suspect that it would.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:38 · Score: 0

>Chaotic storage works because the barcode of each shelved item is scanned together with the barcode of its shelve,
Thanks for the detail, I was wondering how they did search inside.
Then shouldn't it be a "greedy" storage?
Put objects where there is space, after a few run of replacing things in/out, it would look like chaotic.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Nimey · 2012-11-30 02:20 · Score: 1

The wrapper thing is laughably easy to solve: Amazon would simply have to tell their suppliers that if they don't pack stuff in a standardized box they won't buy from them.

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Hail Eris, full of mischief...

E pluribus sanguinem
Re:Humans vs. Robots by wvmarle · 2012-11-30 03:16 · Score: 3

There is a simple reason everything comes in different sized cartons: all products are different size. Outer and inner cartons must be full and not leave any room for a product to move around in it, or it would be damaged in transport. So unless you standardise the size of all your products, that's not going to work.
Standardising carton sizes would result in having to add heaps of filler material (adds cost: material and labour) and wasting space in trucks and shipping containers (adds more cost: less payload per job). That filler material will also mess up your robotics seriously - you still don't know where your product really is, and have more stuff to dig through.
Really, your "laughably easy" solution is just not a solution. Otherwise it would have been done already, look at other parts of transport: the Euro pallet has a size that makes them fit perfectly in rail road cars. Trucks are now being built to fit Euro pallets perfectly. And as much as possible, cartons are made to fit those pallets perfectly. For overseas transport, a 40' shipping container fits twenty standard pallets (1x1.2m) with very little room to spare. And manufacturers will make sure that their cartons stay as close as possible within those measurements. Big bags have a 1x1m footprint, and while their height may vary, the regular heights allow them to be stacked two or three on top of each other for a perfect fit.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Nimey · 2012-11-30 03:59 · Score: 1

I'm not suggesting that there should be a single standard carton; rather, that there be a small number of standard sizes much as Amazon does with the cardboard boxes they deliver things in.
Good point about filler material, though, since you're likely to still have some gap.

--
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E pluribus sanguinem
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 04:38 · Score: 0

They already bought Kiva, which is absolutely brilliant because the shelves are actually carried by robots to the humans, who simply take items off the shelf and box them up. I don't believe that Amazon has yet to integrate Kiva anywhere.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by tlhIngan · 2012-11-30 05:48 · Score: 1

Apparently there is no reason why this wouldn't work with robots. Apparently robots are still to expensive or not smart (in terms of physical skills) enough.I wonder when we'll see Amazon experimenting with robots.
You can get smart systems - either using robotic pickers and conveyor belts or floor pickers that pick entire shelves of systems. These systems are entirely intelligent enough to handle chaotic storage, and often do by moving "hot items" to the spots closest to the packers and leaving the colder items further down.
And the robotic picker systems don't pick an item out, they pick up a plastic container containing multiple items and send it down the ramp to the packer, who picks the correct item out of the container, scans it and puts it into the box. The container then zips around to another packer (if there's something they need) or back onto the shelf.
They're all barcoded systems so the computers easily figure out where everything is.
The only advantage Amazon has with their human-based system is that shelving systems can be rearranged cheaply and easily - te robot systems require extensive infrastructure to be built up (either laying down of cables for tracking, or installing the robotic pickers). So if Amazon needs to expand their warehouse, they can do so far quicker since no robots have to be reprogrammed or anything. And if they decide they hold a lot of small items, they can break down those shelves to hold small items better (robot pickers require every container to be the same size).
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 10:29 · Score: 0

then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part),
Not too hard - depends on the item size and type but vacuum cleaner like sucker with the appropriate head attachment should do the trick. There's an amazing variety of materials handling solutions out there.
Re:Humans vs. Robots by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-01 13:47 · Score: 0

CAT did it back in 1994. And all RF with no labels at all. Granted CAT deals with bigger widgets that made it easier for a computer to calculate volume requirements and pick best spot for new widget. This plant built the large generators that the Philippine government was using to power the capital city from offshore.

Don't ever plan on getting old then. by tebee · 2012-11-29 20:55 · Score: 2

I use very much the same system in my room. Worked fine when I was young, had a brilliant memory and knew where everything was. Now I'm at the "get off my lawn" age, I forget where I put things within two minites of putting them down, Spend half my life looking for things.

Would get myself organised, but at my age the payback time is probably not worth the time spent doing it.

--
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Defragmenting by Sven+Jacobs · 2012-11-29 20:57 · Score: 1

So Amazon is defragmenting their fulfillment centers :-)

Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:02 · Score: 5, Interesting

I work in a fulfilment centre myself, and i can say that while the storage is very efficient, as mentioned, the algorithms that rout pickers to collect the various items leave a lot to be desired. Its all well and good having ingenious storage systems, but if you have to spend 2 minutes walking to a particular shelf location to collect item X passing 8 different bins containing item X along the way, it wastes huge amounts of time and effort. For example, our fulfilment centre is LOSING $250000 due simply to pick-routing inefficiencies...

Re:Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:04 · Score: 0

*I meant to say $250,000 per WEEK
Re:Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 22:23 · Score: 5, Insightful

The reason you have to go to a particular bin is that the company likely runs a FIFO inventory system, so they want you to pick the oldest items first. There are various good reasons to do this (we do it too in normal manufacturing inventory).
Re:Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 22:31 · Score: 0

I think all the money lost in a single week could efficiently be spent to study good routing algorithms, isn't it?
Re:Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 23:40 · Score: 0

There is a formula for computing optimum results. Operations Research.
IF it was optimum, it would either ask you to move it, OR place new stock in a better location.
The math I am familiar is is paging - LRU, TTL, MFU page stealing etc.
And you have to balance cost of storage against cheap ass pittance they pay pickers, and the bribes lorries will pay unload fast.
I suspect they have outsourced the picking operation, and they believe some crap about most efficient and computer etc, and ignore the people who do the job, or the reasons stock tends to gyrate to particular positions. Such as OH&S or truck arriving at the same time due to freeway congestion.
Amazon SHOULD be able to afford a specialist to determine the cause and maximize outcomes. If they don't know the cause by now, they deserve the outcome.
Re:Not all roses... by necro81 · 2012-11-30 00:41 · Score: 2

"Shortest Route" algorithms, such as the traveling salesman problem, are extremely difficult. Sometimes humans can intuit a better solution, but only when the number of spots to hit is small. For a warehouse with millions of items not already organized, it's impossible for a human. The best you can hope for without throwing using every computer on the planet is an approximate solution, which again for large datasets isn't really guaranteed to be all that good.
Re:Not all roses... by jbmartin6 · 2012-11-30 02:01 · Score: 1

Sounds like what they might need is a way for the picker to override the computer route if he knows a better one. Just scan the item and the system adapts. Maybe even track how well each picker improves the computer route and make an incentive. Could be interesting to see the results.

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Re:Not all roses... by hibiki_r · 2012-11-30 02:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

The traveling salesman only becomes hell when the number of stops is very high, and it is relatively expensive to know the cheapest route before point A and point B. The thing is, neither of those is true in a warehouse.
I don't know how long a typical route is for an Amazon picker, but when I was writing warehouse software, pickers were only getting about a dozen items per trip: typically far larger than a book. With so few items, and a warehouse that is not really a random graph, we were able to get extremely good solutions for picking. As an approximation, just try to a mock traveling salesman problem in a square grid, where you can only travel on both axis.
Re:Not all roses... by h4rr4r · 2012-11-30 02:31 · Score: 1

It also ignores FIFO, if you are just going for the closest product. Amazon does not want to have customers returning products because they have clearly sat in a warehouse for years.
Re:Not all roses... by Whatsisname · 2012-11-30 02:36 · Score: 2

There are in the scientific literature published algorithms that produce approximate results well in the "good enough" range, 2-5% larger than optimal, to be worthwhile. For large and small datasets, with millions of points.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter that the warehouse has millions of items, the complexity of the problem depends only on the size of the order, or the sizes of how many orders can be fit in your rolly bin.
Re:Not all roses... by Hulfs · 2012-11-30 03:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

As someone who spent some time several years ago developing a picking algorithm for plumbing / electrical warehouses, there's generally much more to it than just a simple scanning / shortest path equation. You'll generally want to make sure you're going through your older stock first so you don't end up with old, unsellable stock, sometimes you want to actually clear out bins that have only a few items in them to make room for more stock, and many more things. So, just because you may walk by a few bins that have your item in it already doesn't mean the algorithm is dumb (though it very well may mean that), it may mean that those who set up the system assigned higher value to other picking / service priorities than just pick speed.
Re:Not all roses... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 03:45 · Score: 0

This is not a traveling salesman problem. It is a sorting issue. The rows are linear. So you can sort it.
But more than likely it is removing older stock first. So yeah you may walk by 20 bins that hold item X that you are looking for but they want to remove OLDEST item X.
The constraints are storage space. Old stuff on shelves is taking up space...

true key by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:05 · Score: 1

>This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail.

I always believed it was the fact they didn't make any profits during at least 7 years (from 1994 to >2001. This is a very long time loosing money but suffisient to kill any concurrency.

Re:true key by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 03:13 · Score: 2, Insightful

That was step 1. We're at the end of step 2 now. Run razor thin margins while continuing to grow and build efficiency while fighting taxation of online sales. Step 3 is support taxes knowing that your potential competition has either been eliminated or sufficiently crippled, and this will keep them that way. Step 4 will be raise prices and profit.
As The Register pointed out yesterday, thanks to AWS/S3/etc, Amazon may very well have the rest of the world paying its datacenter costs now.

Re:Don't ever plan on getting old then. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:32 · Score: 0

Also forgot how to spell minutes :)

I also pretty much use the quasi-random organization technique. If I use it regularly, I know where it is. If I need it badly, I'll search for it. Other cases, demand the other party produce it.

The Hitmans. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:38 · Score: 0

Missing the barcodes man.

In order to be successful, you must become the Hitmans. Eliminate everyone who disagrees with you.

Re:Don't ever plan on getting old then. by tebee · 2012-11-29 21:46 · Score: 1

Also forgot how to spell minutes :)

Na, never did know how to spell it, I'm an ex-programer and dyslexic - all the best programers are dyslexic :)

(and I had to look up to see if dysleic was spelt with a i or a y !)

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N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.

Re:Don't ever plan on getting old then. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:50 · Score: 0

The problem for me started when I switched from having "my room" to having "my house" and sharing it someone else who also calls it that, with every right. And this someone else also spends more time there than I do, and likes to rearrange "my stuff" ...so ...yeah

Breaking News From 2107 by smittyoneeach · 2012-11-29 21:54 · Score: 4, Funny

Amazon announces that, after a century of tweaking about, they have arrived at a self-replicating fulfillment warehouse system.
Everything is on 23 pairs of rows. The tips of the 23 rows of two warehouses break off intermittently, and circulate freely on the roadways disguised as traffic.
If any two sets of 23 show up in a fulfillment center parking lot and collide, a new fulfillment center is 'conceived', and 'gestates' for a few seasons before making a the shortest possible journey to a new location, where it starts doin' its thang'. A shocking amount of the row storage is metadata, such that a warehouse query fails outright or returns a product at roughly ludicrous speed. "Yeah, it's kind of a b-tree on Brawndo," said Dr. Joey "TT" Torvalds-Tridgell, the 800lb Brain of Amazon.
In other news, Walmart President Sanger is seeking to legalize the abortion of this burgeoning threat, saying that wanton murder, too, is a form of capitalism.

--
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear

Update and it should work by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 21:57 · Score: 0

Just did the upgrade from 16.0.2 to 17, and now it works.

Re:Update and it should work by temcat · 2012-11-29 22:11 · Score: 1

Thanks for the info!
Re:Update and it should work by Samare · 2012-11-30 02:59 · Score: 1

They probably have fixed the site, because it didn't work with Firefox 17 here. I just reloaded the page without restarting Firefox and now it works.
Re:Update and it should work by wvmarle · 2012-11-30 05:53 · Score: 1

Just installed Ubuntu's latest updates including FF 17, but still no luck there.

How can this work? by ShooterNeo · 2012-11-29 22:00 · Score: 2

Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go? That for anything but an item that they picked up recently, a human worker would need to be told where exactly to go to pick up the nearest item X. And even if one of the human workers did remember the last place they saw X, that spot probably is not the closest instance of X. This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.

Re:How can this work? by cripkd · 2012-11-29 22:06 · Score: 1

And? Human, you make it sound as if you're not happy with your future role!

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Curiously yours, crip.
Re:How can this work? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 00:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

You think this is bad ? Then take a look at the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWY8uFlteIM
Now that is a meat waldo.
Re:How can this work? by DarkOx · 2012-11-30 00:43 · Score: 1

This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
Before that they simply served the warehouse manager with his ledger. I think you over stating impact this has on the job role of they typical picker.

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Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Oh I so want that! by SmallFurryCreature · 2012-11-29 22:10 · Score: 2

Just imagine, a girl with all the bits labeled with barcodes so you can scan them and google the manual for it! And easily order replacement parts.

--

MMO Quests are like orgasms:

You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

Re:Oh I so want that! by Wolfraider · 2012-11-30 00:30 · Score: 1

Just imagine, a girl with all the bits labeled with barcodes so you can scan them and google the manual for it! And easily order replacement parts.
And think of the upgrades you would be able to do :)
Re:Oh I so want that! by JustOK · 2012-11-30 01:03 · Score: 2

You still have to do it manually.

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rewriting history since 2109

I'm next! by cripkd · 2012-11-29 22:10 · Score: 1

OMG, so THIS is the real secret of Amazon's success, and now it's out? I've just bought Nile.com so watch out Bezos!

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Curiously yours, crip.

chaos? by Hognoxious · 2012-11-29 22:26 · Score: 1

Chaos was the cool thing back in the 90s, amirite?

--
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."

I actually read this as by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 22:52 · Score: 0

"Inside amazing whorehouse"

Re:Don't ever plan on getting old then. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 22:57 · Score: 0

(and I had to look up to see if dysleic was spelt with a i or a y !)

Both, but also with an 'x'.

Ark of the covenant by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 23:01 · Score: 0

Oh noooo! This is how the US government lost it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ark-of-the-Covenant/dp/B0006HCWNU

They've been doing this since the beginning by sirwired · 2012-11-29 23:26 · Score: 1

They've been doing "random shelving" of their items since their very first fulfillment center that wasn't Jeff Bezos's garage. It isn't particularly new, revolutionary, or a big secret.

Re:They've been doing this since the beginning by TwentyCharsIsNotEnou · 2012-11-30 00:16 · Score: 1

It's still interesting. And, at least to me, new.
Maybe you should read this: http://xkcd.com/1053/

Is this really news? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 23:42 · Score: 0

This is an old and proven way to manage shelf space in a warehouse. This is no news and whoever wrote this article doesn't know much about logistics...

True key to success by agentgonzo · 2012-11-29 23:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

"This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail". That, and not paying any tax.

Re:True key to success by tfocker4 · 2012-11-30 00:33 · Score: 1

Aww man, that's what I was gonna sayyyyyy!
Re:True key to success by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:31 · Score: 0

We have paid tax in our state to Amazon for several years. Still buy everything from Amazon.
Re:True key to success by bill_mcgonigle · 2012-11-30 05:17 · Score: 1

Amazon now charges tax in about half the States. They are still growing.
Gas is expensive, time is money, and customer service is king.

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Re:True key to success by sootman · 2012-11-30 07:38 · Score: 1

And being big enough that they can get by without even making a profit.

Wall Street is on board with an Amazon business strategy that doesn't require it to actually make profits as long as it increases sales volumes. And if you're in any line of business where you compete with Amazon--and Amazon is in a lot of businesses, and seems to get into new ones each year--that should terrify you.

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Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. by Bieeanda · 2012-11-29 23:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

A few years back, someone ordered a book for me from Amazon. The package arrived as normal, but it was a completely different book inside, and one that I already had. So the sender got in touch with Amazon, the order was double-checked, and after some back and forth they sent a new package out.

The second package had the same book in it.

So did the third.

It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.

What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.

Re:Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. by hibiki_r · 2012-11-30 02:09 · Score: 1

I have seen warehouses where the first step in the shipping station is a verification of the contents, including a picture. I guess Amazon thinks this step is too expensive for what it's worth?
Re:Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 02:26 · Score: 0

A few years back, someone ordered a book for me from Amazon. The package arrived as normal, but it was a completely different book inside, and one that I already had. So the sender got in touch with Amazon, the order was double-checked, and after some back and forth they sent a new package out.
The second package had the same book in it.
So did the third.
It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.
What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.
Even 6-sigma has an error rate of 9.4 ppm. I'd be willing to bet Amazon is stocking a variety of products well above 1 million.
Re:Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 03:38 · Score: 0

That has more to do with the product being assigned the wrong ASIN than anything to do with product picking, sorting, or storage.
Re:Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. by thesandtiger · 2012-11-30 06:33 · Score: 1

It was a big problem for YOU, but for Amazon it was a trivial cost of doing business that was likely vastly outweighed by the benefits of their system.
As long as that circumstance isn't too common (and it isn't since it took them so long to address and was confusing - that means it's rare enough that they had to figure out a process to identify and handle it) it isn't worth changing their system.

--
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.

Fuck Slideshows by wadeal · 2012-11-30 00:18 · Score: 1

The next button is broken on the page via Chrome - can't view any other photos.

But then why would I want to see a slideshow of photos that don't even take up a quarter of my screen? And I'm only running 24 inches - do these sites get how stupid they present this information?

It works great by sjbe · 2012-11-30 00:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go?

There is an organizational scheme, it's just not by by product and workers will be told where to go regardless of what storage system the company uses. I implemented a version of this about 10 years ago in our warehouse for an auction company I owned. Basically you build a warehouse with identifiers on the shelving system. Then you assign a random and (this is the important bit) uniformly distributed code to each box/pallet/SKU that you store. You can't tell where a product is by the product, you have to look up the location in the computer but after that it's easy to find. This system works really well when you have a wide array of rapidly changing merchandise that you can't predict arrival times or quantities for. Amazon would be a great fit for a warehousing system like this.

This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.

That's true for pretty much all warehouses regardless of organizational scheme. Once you get to a warehouse of any size you have to have a computer to direct where to find merchandise to pick to an order. Even if the worker knows where to get it they still will need direction from the computer on quantities to pick.

Two Day Shipping Prime by helix2301 · 2012-11-30 00:46 · Score: 1

I know Amazon has take some great strikes in the shipping aspect of prime. They have warehouses just for staging then they have warehouses all around the world the Prime Shipping is great but it was a major under taking in the fulfillment center part of there operation.

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flash drive by mapkinase · 2012-11-30 00:53 · Score: 1

So Amazon storage works as a flash drive.

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Chaotic works sometimes by aitikin · 2012-11-30 00:54 · Score: 2

But when you start adding foodstuffs and chemicals, you'll run into complications and be forced to keep them separate by legal regulation. That's probably part of the reason Amazon's so slow/not getting into foodstuffs.

--
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve

Re:Chaotic works sometimes by ediron2 · 2012-11-30 02:25 · Score: 1

No, that's not really that hard.
A chaotic system works fine; just add the restrictions capability. For example, the programmers/operations engineers involved get told: Foodstuffs can't be next to potential toxins. A flag is added (let's call it FDA1) across the board to all foodstuffs, another to the things they can't be near (FDA2). Then, the chaotic system declares a region of the warehouse FDA1-ok and another FDA2-ok. Takes a split-second more to allocate a new bin, including having built-in 'grow region FDA1-ok' functionality. Buffering distances or anything else just fall into the above decision tree.
Wanna envision this without all the programming? Food on the left rows, pharm on the right. A row for chemicals and cleaners and detergents far from produce. Just like your supermarket. The difference would be that, in a chaotic system, each new case of cheerios to come off the truck could be placed anywhere within the food section where there's space, rather than staff spending hours fronting/rearranging/stocking carefully.
Re:Chaotic works sometimes by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 05:09 · Score: 0

Amazon uses safeway warehouses for most of it's foodstuff.
Re:Chaotic works sometimes by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 07:02 · Score: 0

Excuse me, I have a bunch of grocery items sitting on my doorstep that Amazon placed there.
Yeah, It's not Amazon.com, it's AmazonFresh, but they're clearly getting into the foodstuffs business. And doing a good job of it, imo.
Re:Chaotic works sometimes by aitikin · 2012-11-30 11:42 · Score: 1

Oh I get it, but the beauty of what's being described (at least FTS) is a much more purely chaotic system where anything goes anywhere. Once you start adding this rule for this, that rule for that, it becomes closer to what stores like your Walmarts and Targets already have in place for their inventory systems. I've worked the backroom of a Target and that's essentially what their system is, only it's more of "This is in this aisle, that's in that aisle," so on and so forth, just chaotically arranged in there.

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"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve

Link to photos by pancake_lover · 2012-11-30 00:55 · Score: 4, Informative

The article slideshow isn[t working for me. Some photos from an Amazon warehouse were posted on reddit the other day. Here are those photos: http://imgur.com/a/q1WIO.

--
Homer no function beer well without.

To be contrasted with Kiva-powered warehouses by fgouget · 2012-11-30 01:32 · Score: 1

I just read this article about how GAP and Zappos are using Kiva robots in their warehouses which makes a nice contrast. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots/

As far as I can tell the Kiva warehouses could probably be said to use some form of cahotic storage too. The advantages they cite to using robots are: much higher productivity, less walking for employees, safer and more ergonomic environment, less 'shrinkage' (theft) due to most of the warehouse being robot-only, lower power usage due to greatly reduced need for climate control and lighting (again thanks to the large robot-only area) and lack of conveyor belts running all the time.

That said the Amazon warehouse stores much more diverse merchandise in terms of format, packaging type and weight. Also it has multiple stories, much higher shelves in some areas and generally seems much larger. That may have an impact on whether the Kiva robots would be workable. Or maybe it just means some adjustments would be needed.

Not so terrible by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 01:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

I work at a fulfillment warehouse and it's actually a great place to work. Granted, I'm an office geek but we take care of our hourly workers very well. Everything we do to modify the shipping process (basically an assembly line) is to make things not only quicker but easier on the workers as well. Everyone is encouraged to make contributions to the team and there is plenty of opportunity to move up, get raises etc. Benefits are excellent and the pay is good. Nobody gets chewed out for making a mistake, we just look at the process itself and how we can prevent such a mistake in the future by doing things differently. Why would you run it any other way? The people packing the boxes can make or break the place. It pays to keep them happy and caring about their jobs.

Similar orders by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 02:10 · Score: 0

It helps to land clients that ship 1 of item X to 10,000 different addresses on a bi-weekly basis ;)

In an Amazon-like model, orders are essentially random. We have processes to handle both and the "random" orders take up way, way more time and effort than the "batch" orders. Something crazy like 100 times as much effort. If you have the financial wiggle room, turn away the random clients and go after someone that has one or two products and a million customers.

slideshow pictures for non-working browsers: by SETY · 2012-11-30 02:31 · Score: 3, Informative

Re:slideshow pictures for non-working browsers: by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 06:08 · Score: 0

Wow - all that stock held in a bricks and mortar store. It's so last century. They should use the Internet to gain just-in-time delivery.

Hmmm chaotic storage? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 02:41 · Score: 0

I think real chaos could be introduced if someone were to swap locations of random items after the initial location was entered on the computer.

I'm not saying it's not interesting by sirwired · 2012-11-30 03:13 · Score: 1

I'm not saying it's not an interesting, non-intuitive way of shelving goods. (At least its non-intuitive if you don't design DC's for a living) What I am saying is that it's not "the true key to Amazon's long-term success" like the summary stated. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that if Amazon had decided to organize their goods like a library, they'd have gone bankrupt a VERY long time ago. Pretty much EVERY retail-order DC of any size shelves goods this way, and has done so for quite some time; Amazon certainly wasn't the first.

What is a real shame is that Amazon HAS done very innovative and unique stuff with order assembly (bringing the items together in a multi-item order) in their warehouses, yet the article focused solely on the one thing that is utterly non-unique to Amazon.

Re:I'm not saying it's not interesting by TwentyCharsIsNotEnou · 2012-11-30 04:22 · Score: 1

What is a real shame is that Amazon HAS done very innovative and unique stuff with order assembly (bringing the items together in a multi-item order) in their warehouses
Yup, fair enough - as it was, I was just blown away by the fact that something on as large a scale as Amazon can work like that (granted, not a surprise to anyone versed in the matter).

But yeah, now I want more details!

Firefly != Country Music by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 04:10 · Score: 0

This explains why I ordered Firefly and Serenity and received two random country music CDs instead!

Common enough, actually. by pluther · 2012-11-30 05:01 · Score: 1

The auto-parts warehouse I worked at in the late 80s had a similar system.

It actually worked out pretty well. At the beginning of each 4-hour shift, you get a series of pull tags, put them in order by aisle and shelf, then just take a cart along and do a single circuit of the warehouse, pulling the parts in order of the tags.

I think they did make some attempt at keeping things in specific order, but since it changed so much it didn't really make any difference. As long as the computer knew where everything was, it worked.

No running back and forth or criss-crossing the warehouse needed. With a modern computer system, it could be even more efficient. The computer can give you the tags in order, and different people could take different parts of the warehouse to speed things up even more.

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If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.

The Ark by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 06:34 · Score: 0

It's in there... http://www.amazon.com/Ezekiel-37-26-27-Covenant-Sculpture/dp/B0096X9MOC/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1354300212&sr=1-1&keywords=Ark+of+the+covenant

chatotic storage aka... by bodland · 2012-11-30 08:14 · Score: 1

Wasted space storage....
I can't anything when the network is down storage....

Inside Amy Winehouse by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 08:45 · Score: 0

I clicked this because I read "Inside Amy Winehouse", thinking it was some results of an autopsy or something...

warehouse = hard drive by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-30 10:54 · Score: 0

All you need to know is where XZY is piled.

Re: One ugly web page! by antdude · 2012-11-30 13:20 · Score: 1

Also, use http://deslide.clusterfake.net/?o=html_table&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.com%2Finside-amazon-warehouse-photos-909410 OR http://desli.de/FTE ... http://deslide.clusterfake.net/ rocks! :)

--
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).

Chaotic Storage by lsatenstein · 2012-12-01 09:21 · Score: 1

As posted earlier, Chaotic storage is great for automated pick lists and the picking is for low volume or high volumes of items.
The reason is apparent. With low volumes, the device goes to the row, aisle bin, and selects the item, goes to the next place, and returns with the goods.

At high volume, (many many picks), the system can reorder the picking to optimise the routes within that warehouse area. Picker units do not cross zones.

If an item is very popular, the idea is to move it closer to the shipping docks where human hands can take it, package, and ship it after invoicing.

Like other picklist systems, the orders are best handled in next day daily batches. Immediate day delivery adds cost. With batching, the sorting for picking for air, road, and rail delivery can be performed at a first level, and then by location within the warehouse as the second level sort.

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Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada

IBM Tape Silo system. Also paging. by DutchUncle · 2012-12-01 14:30 · Score: 1

Not exactly a new idea. Perhaps surprising that they rely on it with manual picking, but since a lot of their orders are timely, the "most recent" stuff is all together still on the pallet it arrived on. And as noted by others, as long as the pick list is arranged in physical order by the inventory system, there's not much lost time.

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