Chris Anderson at his Long Tail blog has a perfect example of the power of the miscellaneous. Zappos organizes its massive warehouse of shoes by just putting shoes wherever there’s room. Now that we have them new-fangled computer-a-bobs, Zappos can find each pair by looking up their UPC. As Chris says, “No single trip is optimized, but the system as a whole works as a minimum-effort machine.”

The comments to the post are great, also.

(Chris has been saying nice things about Everything Is Miscellaneous ever since my publisher sent him a blurber’s draft. Thank you, Chris.)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous warehouse inventory zappos chris_anderson long_tail ]

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