The Storehouse

A conventional town’s inventory sits scattered — every store keeps its own back room, every back room carries its own safety margin against its own uncertainty, and all of that redundancy is paid for many times over. This design replaces that entirely: one pooled inventory, housed in the storehouse space built into the Stadium Square‘s ring buildings, that roughly 1,920 businesses draw from directly rather than each holding stock of their own.

Pooling works because of a real statistical effect, not just convenience. Safety stock scattered across many locations has to cover each location’s own worst case independently; pooled into one place, the total buffer needed shrinks by roughly the square root of the number of places it would otherwise have been spread across. Cycle stock shrinks with it, because the central ring can reorder in bulk while individual businesses simply draw packets as their work actually needs them, rather than each guessing their own reorder point.

The system is built on two fixed units, both tied to the same 0.625 m grid that runs through the rest of the design. A packet — one grid by one grid by one tile, 0.122 m³ — is the smallest unit anything moves in. A container holds 384 packets in a 12×4×4 grid footprint, and containers move through the ring on an automated robotic system running continuously, not on a human schedule.

Capacity is deliberately tight, not generous: the ring holds about 169,000 m³ against a projected need of 177,000 m³ — a fill margin of 0.95, described in the source material as “full, and not too much.” That’s a real design choice worth being honest about: every line feeding that need estimate carries roughly 30% uncertainty of its own, so a 0.95 margin is closer to a bet than a guarantee. If actual demand runs even modestly above projection, this is the number that breaks first.

What doesn’t happen here is ownership changing hands

A business’s draw from the storehouse is metered as an input to its own accounts, but title to the inventory itself never moves — it stays with the community throughout, the same custody-without-title structure that governs every other physical asset in this system. The storehouse holds the goods; the business simply draws what its work requires.

Governed by Bureau 1.