Warehouse – A large building for storing goods (for the purpose of distribution, sale or manufacturing

(Pronounced wair-hows)

To remember what warehouse means use the following mnemonic:

This place is where a house (warehouse) could be stored, it's so big.

A small warehouse would be 5000 square feet in size, but the largest warehouse in the world is 4.3 million square feet.

Warehouses are used by many types of businesses that need to temporarily store resources or finished products. Limiting the use of warehouses is a key element of the just-in-time inventory management system, as the cost of storage has a negative impact on profit margins due to staff and rent/mortgage costs. Despite the cost, the number and size of warehouses have increased due to e-commerce businesses that require the storage of huge amounts of stock, for example, Amazon.

Companies like Amazon are building giant warehouses with racking from floor to ceiling in which automated tracking machines and elaborate methods are used to pick and fetch one of many million items kept in one place.

Carefully designed warehouses integrated into modern-day distribution centres may be vastly expensive but bring long-term automated efficiencies for storage that couldn’t have been conceived 50 years ago.