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Amazon’s warehouses are intentionally disorganized to increase efficiency and ensure items are stored closer to where they are needed. The company ships about 5 billion Prime items a year and relies on electronic scanning and robots to move shelves. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 selling only books and every employee, including the CEO, works customer service for two days every two years.
Online retailer Amazon may be famous for selling just about everything and shipping it fast, but hidden away within the company’s warehouses lies what may be its greatest achievement: utter randomness. Traditional warehouses group items together: all the lamps are on one shelf and all the laptops on another. Not on Amazon. Creating a messy mess, Amazon’s warehouse employees store things just about anywhere they fit. The logic? Because Amazon’s warehouses are huge — one is the size of 17 football fields — and the company ships about 5 billion Prime items a year, the retailer realized it couldn’t rely on a system where one shelf full of lamps could hold hundreds of feet away when you just need it. By randomly placing lamps where they fit, employees greatly increase the odds of having one nearby when a customer orders it. Electronic scanning of each item as it is put away also helps to have robots able to move the shelves.
Some “primary” facts about Amazon:
In 1994, Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage in Bellevue, Washington and originally only sold books.
When its website crashed for 40 minutes in 2013, Amazon lost $4.8 million dollars, or $120,000 per minute.
Every Amazon employee, including the CEO, works the customer service desk for two days every two years to better understand the process.
