By Philip C.
Amazon Prime Now has just launched in Singapore. The service boasts a huge range of items, including groceries, household and home essentials, baby, beauty, electronics, toys, and more.
Prime Now
Orders placed through the Prime Now app will be delivered to your doorstep within two hours for free if you meet the S$40 minimum order. For orders under S$40, the delivery fee is S$5.99. Deliveries also extend to Sentosa. There is an express option that can shorten delivery times to one hour for a fee of $9.99 – for those who are in a rush. This service isn’t 24-hour unfortunately - deliveries take place from 10 AM to 10 PM daily.
The Facility
Amazon has a huge warehouse at the Mapletree Logistics Hub off Toh Guan Road East, an enormous facility spanning about 100,000 square feet, with Amazon claiming this to be the largest urban Prime Now fulfillment center in the world.
The DisORDER
The facility is an interesting place – Amazon showed us its random stocking method – digitally tagged items are placed randomly on the shelves, a quick look at the stocked shelves seems like a mess, a nightmare for the OCD.
There is a purpose for their seemingly random stocking however, Amazon claims that this lessens traffic. Need a book? Go to the nearest shelf and there is a book in one of the compartments. If there are multiple orders for books, no bottlenecks will occur which decreases efficiency. Another reason for this stacking is for accuracy of the items taken. If all the books were shelves together, the warehouse workers would still have to sift through each individual book’s ID to find the correct book that was bought. All in all, we found that this ‘organised chaos’ method of stocking is pretty ingenious, kudos to Amazon. |