Inside an Amazon Warehouse

redletterdave writes "In each one of Amazon.com's 80 fulfillment centers around the globe, Amazon relies on barcodes and human hands rather than robots or automation to find and ship the proper items in a quick and efficient manner. Without robots, Amazon utilizes a system known as 'chaotic storage,' where products are essentially shelved at random but are tagged with barcodes to be scanned at every step of the ordering, selection and shipping process. The real advantage to chaotic storage is that it's significantly more flexible than conventional storage systems. If there are big changes in a product range, the company doesn't need to plan for more space, because the products or their sales volumes don't need to be known or planned in advance if they're simply being stored at random. Free space is also better utilized in a chaotic storage system, and it's also a major time saver to not organize products as they come in. This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail."

Comments

My desk isn't a mess!

[Anonymous Coward]

I utilize a chaotic storage system.

Re:My desk isn't a mess!

[hughbar]

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...

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hmm...

[gagol]

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

ADHD girl

[girlintraining]

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?

Re:ADHD girl

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Barcodes! You need barcodes!

Re:ADHD girl

[girlintraining]

Barcodes! You need barcodes!

To breed? Jeez... I knew I was missing something obvious.

Re:ADHD girl

[jamesh]

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

[jones_supa]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[flyingfsck]

You mean Bracodes...

Re:ADHD girl

[sa1lnr]

Oh man, little do you know.

There's a veritable minefield of codes to navigate when it comes to women. :)

Re:ADHD girl

[silentcoder]

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

Breaking News From 2107

[smittyoneeach]

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.