Comment by beart
6 years ago
Not all distribution centers validate weight, don't recall if Amazon does but I would be surprised if they don't. High speed scales are expensive.
6 years ago
Not all distribution centers validate weight, don't recall if Amazon does but I would be surprised if they don't. High speed scales are expensive.
A few people got a box of rocks instead of a $4k camera awhile back, one guy got two boxes of rocks after returning the first.
Thinking about this more, I'm surprised this couldn't be caught when the items got delivered to Amazon. I find it extremely unlikely that a picking robot accidentally found an item with the same barcode if they weren't already in the wrong place.
Seems like when the items arrived at the fulfilment centre, they got mis-scanned and ended up comingled. Presumably that's the stage where you can check weight and volume - eg does this item fit with the known dimensions.
This check must be made somewhere otherwise people wouldn't bother returning high value electronics with rocks inside (presumably someone does a cursory check of weight before the inventory gets comingled again).
It's not unusual for warehouses to deal with items with multiple barcodes.
For a technology example, you might get a network card with a UPC barcode, but also a MAC address barcode, and a manufacturer's part number barcode. A wholesaler/ manufacturer sells boxes of 20 items to resellers? The outer box will have a barcode. That box got sent by courier? Three barcodes on some mailing labels.
So at a goods-in station, the usual response to "multiple barcodes, some don't make sense" is "Keep trying until you find one that does make sense"
Those multiple barcodes also confuse the crap out of self-check-out stations. Once it picks up on the wrong one, it throws a fault that the attendant has to come back out of, so you can't just back out scan the right one.
What baffles me is that the store/software can't build a dictionary of "known misdirection" barcodes, like "this is the shipping carton not the product itself, fault and tell the user to rescan, but don't just lock up" when they're seen.
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