Warehouses are bigger

1. D.B. Schenker's Warehouse in Germany
2. National Archives in Winsford, Cheshire
3. Bank of England's Vault beneath London
4. Amazon Warehouse
5. Meyer Werft, Papenburg, Germany
6. Google Data Centre, Georgia
7. Champagne Warehouse, France
8. M & S Warehouse, Castle Donington
9. Constellation Europe, UK
10. The Abandoned Soviet Space Centre

This is an abridged list from Go Supply Chain - I haven't included the factories that I covered in the last post.

II

A lot of the sites I landed on were stingy in the number of warehouses they list and mix factories with warehouses. Even these lists manage to have Target Import Warehouse, which I understand is big, in the list of large factories; despite the idea of importing something that has already been processed as not a feature of factories but very much one of warehouses. It's even in the name. Only it doesn't appear in this second list.

The staff compiling the second list take 'warehouse' to mean a place where things are stored. They can house items that will be sold to retailers or direct or, equally, they can store data or records. Artefacts with never an intent to disperse.
It's different to the common notion I had of what a warehouse looked like once the conversation strayed from champagne and Marks and Spencer but the hundred mile saltmine as repository because of its stable conditions is irresistible to this records manager of yore, and Amazon and Google don't just exist in cyberspace.

The sheer scale in commercial warehouses suggests Boeing manufacturing plant, NASA and the Soviet Space Centre. Go Supply Chain's inclusion of a bank vault is acceptable here because of the wider brief and it makes for a fascinating account. All that hoarded gold.