COLUMBUS — Someone in central Ohio ordered toilet paper, cat food, cat litter, and a folding trampoline from Amazon on Tuesday — and he or she needed them pronto.
The Seattle online retailer launched its Amazon Prime Now service in central Ohio just a few weeks ago. It gives Prime members access to free two-hour delivery (or one-hour delivery for $7.99) of tens of thousands of items as disparate as fresh avocados and 60-inch Samsung televisions.
As a worker picked the items from among the dozens of rows of gray steel shelves in a warehouse off Interchange Road on the West Side and placed them on a wheeled cart, it becomes obvious that the variety and scope of products, arrayed at random in small bins, is not a mistake.
A computer chip shares space with Neutrogena face lotion. A bag of rice rests on a phone charger. Baby wipes sit beside a PlayStation video game. A Snickers bar, a Star Wars Storm Trooper action figure, and Old Spice deodorant share bin space in another.
It’s odd, yet effective.
“We utilize our space very efficiently,” said Aaron Toso, an Amazon spokesman. “We call it random stow, because people shop randomly.”
The idea is that to get an order picked, packed, and shipped in an hour, workers can’t sprint from aisle to aisle to get the salsa, chips, bread, a waterproof cell-phone case, and hammock someone wants that day for a picnic. So at Amazon’s Prime Now hub, an order can often be picked from one randomly stocked aisle.
“We’ve taken 20 years of experience and technology to create this,” Mr. Toso explained.
Some things are grouped less randomly. Frozen food, from ice cream to pizza, is stored together in a walk-in freezer. Milk and other cold items are found in a cooler.
That order of cat litter and the trampoline? The customer received it between noon and 2 p.m. Tuesday. The hub also packages orders for specified deliver times.
The hub stocks tens of thousands of Amazon’s most popular items while a fulfillment center, which might be 10 times as large, stocks millions of goods.
Meanwhile, east of Columbus, at Etna Township in Licking County, hundreds of construction workers have worked since November to complete an Amazon distribution center.
Expected to be completed by the fall, this one is unlike the comparatively snug Prime Now hub. The center under construction has a footprint of more than 800,000 square feet, but with four floors of storage and sorting.
First Published May 26, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
