[krapp]

It's not a matter of it being a waste of space, even, but a waste of time. The first person in a FC to even see an item after the boxes get offloaded from the trucks is probably a stower who is being paid as little as possible to do nothing but scan whatever ASINs are in front of them and shove things into the bins as fast as possible.

Any random bin can contain books, food, electronics, jewelry, anything from anywhere as it gets picked from, restowed into, counted and recounted, etc. There's little room for quality control before items are available for purchase, because the system is optimized to get as many things listed on the site as quickly as possible. There are many ways in which the process could be made more robust, but it won't be because doing so would cost precious seconds.