Packing your Order and the Peanut Gun

With your order now complete, your tub heads down this high speed rolling conveyer but you will note that the conveyer has a row of metal links on the right side. The purpose of these links is to push your tub into the appropriate ramp for boxing when the system tells it that one is free. The picture below shows the metal links in action:


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After your tub is sent down the ramp, everything is removed from the tub, scanned and compared against your order. Newegg's system will not print a shipping label unless the items in your tub match the items you ordered. With everything scanned and your label printed your items are boxed and then sent off to the peanut gun.


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The peanut gun is by far one of the coolest things in Newegg's warehouse, and it's exactly what you'd expect. An enormous vat of packaging peanuts is hung from the ceiling of the warehouse (pictured above) and individual guns dangle from it like cow udders (pretty picture):


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The peanut gun itself is pretty simple; you aim, squeeze the trigger and peanuts come out:


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With your valuables bubble wrapped and the box filled with peanuts, it's handed off to the automatic taping machine. That's right, you hold the box shut and feed it into the machine that takes over and tapes it shut.


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The Secure Area and Free CPUs The Automatic Box Maker
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  • jamesbond007 - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    Thanks Anand and NewEgg for the great pics and tour! As a long-time NewEgg customer, it was very intriguing to read the article and gaze at the pictures because I've always wondered how a place like that worked. =)

    Cheers!
    ~Travis W.
  • flexy - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    this looks sooooooooooooooo much like my f****g work - except that the items at newegg are approx. 10000000 times more interesting than what we deal with every day ;)
  • bbomb - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    I worked on an aembly line putting together boxes for vent hoods to go in. That was the longest fucking week of my life. I wonder why the vent hood people didnt have the box-putter-together machine.
  • PandaBear - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    The last company I worked for used to be part of Mitsubishi, and you would be surprised how much cheaper our shipping was compare to you going to Kinko's yourself, it was almost 1/2 off.

    I would imagine Newegg got a deal with UPS that makes it much cheaper than FedEx Ground.
  • Reflex - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    Been a customer of theirs for years, pretty much since Egghead went under(remember them?). Service has always been great and they are the first place I reccomend to techs and resellers. Sure beats the old days of having to have a tax ID and account with a distributer.
  • Powermoloch - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    Thanks for the article Anand...really appreciate it. I didn't expect the warehouse to look like that !
  • cw42 - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    pics coulda been better, but AWESOME ARTICLE.

    Thanks newegg.
  • bob661 - Wednesday, February 15, 2006 - link

    Pics looked good to me.
  • StevenYoo - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    nice read.

    man, part of me really wants to win that CPU!

    but the other part of me doesn't so I don't have to buy a new mobo, etc.
  • NeonAura - Tuesday, February 14, 2006 - link

    Contest for AMD X2s.. excellent :)
    And, there shouldn't be many entries outside of Anandtech, because the contest entry isn't open for a long time and because the link's broken. Noobs won't get it :)

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