When thinking of the word “warehouse,” you might picture a building filled with shelves stocked high with a large array of items. Taking the thought further, you might rationalize that the products are placed in the same categories throughout the building. This standard practice is done to keep order within the warehouse. That way, products can be accessed quickly and in an orderly fashion. The last thing you might expect in any warehouse setting would be having the products stored together at random and in no logical order. But that’s exactly the method Amazon workers place their products when stocking their warehouse.

Amazon.com’s Prime Now warehouse goes against the “normal” way warehouses might be run and is what some may call complete chaos. A DVD stocked on the same shelf as pickles? To outsiders, it’s madness, but to Amazon Prime warehouse workers, it’s bliss.

With their tens of thousands of products scattered all over the warehouse, how is it that Amazon Prime is able to deliver in under an hour? It is, in fact, the apparent disorder that makes the Amazon warehouse so efficient. The madness has a system, and it’s done for a reason. As the workers shelve their products, each item is scanned. This tells the Amazon’s computers which product is placed where throughout the warehouse. No matter if it’s a particular book placed next to a box of cereal or flour next to moisturizer.

Still confused on how this all works? Let’s say an order comes in and it’s processed through the system. One of Amazon’s computers then finds the fastest route through the warehouse that all of the items on the order fulfill. This information is transferred to a handheld device that the workers carry as they move through the warehouse. In this way, Amazon Prime Now is able to deliver to its customers in under an hour, keeping both its customers and workers happy in an organized madness. Amazon has become one of the world’s largest companies by doing things differently, and their warehouse is no exception.