Here in a sprawling warehouse, ringed by soybean fields and dairy farms, lies one of the invisible nerve centers of the Web-retailing revolution. Hundreds of employees whiz through the warehouse aisles on forklifts and cargo haulers, filling orders for the Web sites of Wal-Mart, eToys, Fingerhut, and other online retailers. The workers snatch goods off thousands of shelves and deliver them to an army of packers, who box the orders and drop them on conveyor belts.
Every item has a special code to speed up the packing.
A 27-inch television takes an X1, indicating the item is heavy and must be shipped by itself. Lighter-weight valuable items, like VCRs, take a 200 code. That means it requires an additional layer of wrapping paper to help disguise it on a customer's doorstep. Red lasers scan each package as it zips by on the conveyor belt. Vernon Nies, who runs the warehouse for Fingerhut Cos., boasts that his crew can process as many as 30,000 items an hour.