50 Employees in One Netflix Warehouse sorts 60,000 Discs
Daily, 1.6 Million Nationally
By Malcolm Owen | No CommentsLeave a Comment
Posted: Friday, April 3, 2009 at 12:42 am

I suppose everyone has a vague idea how film rentals work. Most of us have been to a Blockbuster or similar and asked for a film that’s always out of stock and then have to spend time deciding between a ton of romantic comedies that you have no interest in at all before going home and playing a random console game, but we all don’t really have much of an idea of what happens behind the scenes when doing it by mail…

Netflix (large mail-order DVD rental company in the US, for those that don’t know despite the marketing) is undeniably large, and apparently damn good as far as companies go. Boston.com managed to get a tour of one of the 46 warehouses in the US that sorts through about 60,000 DVDs (Other formats are available) on a daily basis. That’s 60,000 in ONE DAY. Nationally they do 1.6 MILLION. Staggering.

On the tour, they show 50 people flicking through between 500 and 700 DVDs an hour eachthat have been sent back, and need to be opened, checked for damage, organised, reallocated to other customers, packaged then mailed out again. It is a majorly tedious process that few outside of factory work will trully understand.
Of course, computers are involved when it comes down to selecting whom gets what, but for the most part it is an extremely, and scarily, human process.

So the next time you recieve another blockbuster movie to screen on your HDTV, think of the amount of human effort that has to be done in order for you to get it…

[Via HardOCP via Boston.com]