Why Amazon’s Shelving Practice Works

Amazon has built a pretty robust reputation for exceptional logistics and customer service.

This is partly credited to their robust, unorthodox organization – or lack thereof organization of merchandise in their warehouse shelving. Rather than clustering items by SKU, or category in a certain bin or location, they’re typically just scattered everywhere throughout a matrix of aisles. For example, you may find a toothbrush and a banana in the same bin of an aisle, rather than finding them separately in a more organized fashion.

The Irony.

One would think this is quite odd, and would lead to a very impractical and in-efficient logistic practice. On the contrary, this is likely more efficient than conventional picking systems. The reason for this is quite simple – time savings. Let’s look at things this way: Suppose you visit a grocery store, and you know you want to purchase bananas…and a toothbrush. You’d walk towards the oral care aisle somewhere in the left or right inner area of the store. Then you’d walk towards to produce section towards the outer area of the store before going to the checkout. For all we know, these 2 items may be completely on opposite sides of the store. Imagine how much walking you’d have to do just to pick these 2 items.

Now on the flip side, let’s assume this grocery store stocked toothbrushes and bananas right next to each other on aisle 5, and you presumed this would be the case before walking in. You would need to simply walk to that one aisle, and out to checkout and be done. This would translate to significantly less distance walked, and less time spent picking the items.

The Amazon picking system works sort of like this, where pickers, through their device, can determine the exact locations they need to travel to – and through these arbitrarily placed stocking methods – can minimize the number of aisles they would need to explore, as they can now pick a variety of different products in a small number of aisles, reducing picking time.

The reason I’m writing about this is because a personal experience helps me relate to this phenomenon.

Folding clothes.

When I used to live alone, I would do my laundry and leave my clothes in a pile of mess. Conventional wisdom would typically frown upon this. However, now that my significant other folds the laundry, and organizes them into their dedicated areas throughout the room and various drawers and closets, I’ve come to realize that folding and storing clothes in a neat fashion is counterproductive. It takes a substantial amount of time to not only fold clothes, but to put an outfit together and pick each piece from their dedicated locations. I know this sounds silly, but give it some thought. Alternatively, the pile of unfolded clothes was far more time-efficient. At a single glance, I could easily see all pieces of an outfit lumped together, and just pick what I need from this centralized location without having to go on a quest.

It may appear unprofessional, or irresponsible, or impractical; but the fact of the matter is, the lump of unfolded laundry is much more efficient, similar to Amazon’s unorganized shelving practice.