ShaveWell ships its mirrors to Amazon, and the company distributes them across its network of fulfillment centers, including PHX6 in Phoenix. At an Amazon FC, “inbounding” is nearly as important a process as shipping orders out. Trucks arrive with boxes of goods that workers open, scan, and put into totes. Conveyors route the totes to different parts of the warehouse, where other workers unload them, scan them again, and then scan the barcode of the cubby where they’re stored. Now the FC “knows” where to find the ShaveWell mirror or anything else when a customer places an order.
The inventory at PHX6 is made up largely of “smalls,” merchandise small enough to be stored on shelves about the size of those at a typical library, which is exactly how Amazon refers to the levels of seemingly endless metal shelving at PHX. Each shelf is divided into small cubbies, and each cubby gets a barcode and an alphanumeric ID, much like the Dewey Decimal System. It was in one of these that we found the ShaveWell mirror.
Items are simply shelved where they fit, with identical copies stowed in spots throughout the warehouse.
But unlike the Dewey Decimal System, the codes don’t signify anything about the category of what’s in the cubby. Items are simply shelved where they fit, with identical copies stowed in spots throughout the warehouse to make them accessible to make it less likely a worker will have to travel far to find one.
Every order funneled from Amazon’s website to PHX6 is relayed to a handheld scanner carried by all workers in the library, or “pick mods.” The scanners direct the workers to the cubbies where the ordered items are stored. The item is picked, scanned, then placed into a tote, which is also scanned. When a tote is filled, it travels along a conveyor system made up of ramps, long straightaways, and towering corkscrews to get prepped for shipping back out into the world.