Amazon built its hyper efficient warehouses by embracing chaos — Quartz

When Dave Alperson got his first job at an Amazon warehouse in 1997, as a temporary hourly employee, it involved walking around the warehouse with a list of where to find products—mostly books—that customers had ordered. Twenty years later, as a regional director of operations for Amazon in Indiana, he oversees 18 warehouses that barely resemble where he started. Amazon now sells millions of products; each of its 149 warehouses ship tens of thousands of them each day; and those warehouses now look like live-action games of Chutes and Ladders—whizzing with a meticulously coordinated system of conveyor belts, slides, and machines that do everything from attach labels to boxes to check weight for quality control. In the process of building this elaborate system, Amazon has completely redefined warehouse efficiency and customer convenience. Through its Prime membership, it has promised tens of millions of customers free two-day shipping on more than 100 million products, and, last year, it

When Dave Alperson got his first job at an Amazon warehouse in 1997, as a temporary hourly employee, it involved walking around the warehouse with a list of where to find products—mostly books—that customers had ordered. Twenty years later, as a regional director of operations for Amazon in Indiana, he oversees 18 warehouses that barely resemble where he started. Amazon now sells millions of products; each of its 149 warehouses ship tens of thousands of them each day; and those warehouses now look like live-action games of Chutes and Ladders—whizzing with a meticulously coordinated system of c