Technology

The Chaotic Warehouses Of Amazon.com

Updated June 29, 2019

The online retail giant Amazon.com stow products in chaotic warehouses.

Amazon.com is an online retailer that operate huge warehouses around the world. Products arriving at the warehouses are stored randomly - a principle known as chaotic storage or random location storage, or as Amazon themselves call it - "random stow".^[1] This means that a newly arrived item is not placed among items of the same kind, but simply where there is space in the warehouse. Shoes and books, video games and kitchen utensils - everything is mixed together.

Amazon.com - sort their products according to chaotic storage.

Photo: Álvaro Ibáñez

So how does the warehouse staff find anything? The information of a product's whereabout is stored in Amazon's IT system. The information is requested when the product needs to be retrieved.^[1] In Amazon's most modern warehouses, conveyor belts and robots do a lot of the work - when an item needs retrieving, a robot drives an entire shelf to an employee, who then picks the right item and places it on a conveyor belt for further transportation to a packing station.^[1] This "chaotic" warehousing saves time.^[1] Another advantage is that storing items of different sizes at the same place is space-saving.^[1]