Amazon. The Behemoth of Booksellers. The Disruptor of Retail. The Patron Saint of the US Postal Service (their Prime saved USPS’s bacon).
Amazon. The Paragon of Predictive Analytics. The Role Model of Recommendation Systems.
Given Amazon’s obsession with data and analytics, I was blown away when I saw this video of how Amazon arranges their Prime Now warehouse.
Unlike old-fashioned brick and mortar department stores, where similar or related items are clustered together, Amazon stocks their warehouse shelves randomly. An item’s location is scanned when a worker drops it into the nearest bin. That location data is used by algorithm-driven, number-crunching software to decide the optimal route for a worker to fill orders.
It turns out that random stocking is highly efficient because it gives the most options for finding an optimal route for the warehouse worker to fill up your basket. There are whole disciplines in mathematics dealing with selecting the best route out of the hundreds possible (aka The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP)). The rise of the smart machine/smart analytics allows Amazon to use this method to get us our stuff so fast.
Sometimes random is the most logical.