I left work early Tuesday afternoon to go to the airport and catch a flight to Reno, Nevada. This was my second day on the job, and I had barely unpacked my luggage from the flight over here.
After a fulfilling dinner at the hotel restaurant, I ventured into the casino under the hotel. True to my luck, I lost some money. But it's all in good humour since we Chinese consider it as "buying" a successful and healthy new year. I had to hit the sack early to be ready for a 7:15 start.
The distribution center was in Fernley, about 25 miles east of Reno. On the way out there we passed by Mustang, a well know brothel. The DC was quite literally in the middle of nowhere. We drove through the canyon, and arrived at a flat plain where there was the distribution center, a hotel, some restaurants, and road in 4 directions. Security was pretty tight, everyone had to go through metal detectors both on their way in as well as on their way out to make sure they weren't stealing anything.
The DC is enormous, and pretty cool too. The first thing you see is the rows upon rows of merchandise. I say merchandise (rather than books) because most things are randomly stowed (as in not alphabetical), and books were mixed together with cd's and USB cables and 20 gig iPod's. But things still had its order, and it was actually pretty easy to pick items. The pickers carried around a RF gun, and it directed them to the next bin, and told them what title to find.
After the picking, the items are sent to be packaged. There are several methods of packaging (and too long to describe), but the most interesting piece of machinery would have to be the sorter. Individual items are scanned and placed on the sorter, which automagically puts different items from the same shipment together, ready to be packaged. I truely felt like I was in one of those TLC "how'd they do it" shows.
Lastly, the packaged items are slapped on with a label, and ready to be shipped.
I'd like to say more, but I'm not exactly sure what is and is not covered by my NDA.
