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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

>It serves a real beneficial purpose for those of us who have missed packages while at work and had to drive 20min in terrible traffic to the nearest FedEx/UPS/etc retail outlet

There is a low-tech solution for this already..you have normal package lockers near the mailroom which have keys. Your package is put in a locker, and the corresponding key is put into your mailbox.

Seems way easier and the only way this is better is if the touchscreen system works for signature required packages, allowing them to be dropped off without you

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I addressed the "dumb" boxes in my original comment. But another point is that these hubs can be "appended" to buildings without these parcel rooms/infrastructure that are offered by those larger apartment buildings.

There are plenty of other properties that could utilize this too such as multi-tenant office buildings and plenty of other non-apartment building use cases.

It also productizes these boxes so they can buy one of these instead of setting of a mail center and doing the subsequent maintenance (ie: cutting keys, replacing lost ones, etc). And it notifies the people by email/mobile which makes it a nice value add-on for property owners to sell with the property.

Why can't a 'dumb' hub be appended as well? I have them at my new apt complex now, not the 'smart' ones, and they seem to work alright. It's right next to the mailboxes for the complex. Again, it's only USPS that uses the 'dumb' hub, all the other companies just drop things off at the door. It's not a big deal, at least for the area I live in.

> There is a low-tech solution for this already..you have normal package lockers near the mailroom which have keys. Your package is put in a locker, and the corresponding key is put into your mailbox.

How would that work with multiple delivery services? A FedEx or UPS worker, for instance, cannot legally put a package locker key into a USPS mailbox (and usually, in apartment mailbox banks, cannot even physically do so even if they are willing to ignore the law).

The USPS already partners with all the big carriers for Amazon deliveries, so they could solve the problem.

Alternatively: put in boxes not owned by the usps, and use combination locks. The "special delivery instructions" box on every order form on earth already supports this.

The main problems with outdoor lock boxes are moisture and heat. The main problem with indoor ones is that you need a mail room, and they tend to be shared.

I don't see how this new product helps in most circumstances. I guess it could be useful in high crime urban settings, but mail lock boxes are already common there.

At my complex of 65 units, there are a total of 12 package lockers all smaller than 12"x12".

OnTrac has taken over most Amazon deliveries at this apartment. They don't know the door code to get in (ups/FedEx/usps do). So, they leave packages by the exterior door. Usually the wrong one.

"Fool-proof" never takes into account the ingenuity of fools. ;)

Japan is low-tech. The lockers are near the mailboxes.

Mailman puts the package in the mailbox which has a keypad and low-tech 1980's calculator style 1 line display.

He put package in locker. It generates and displays a pin-code, he write it down on a slip of paper with the locker number and puts it in your mailbox.

Works very well.

(I think he has to swipe a card to allow him to lock the thing in the first place. To stop random people using it).

Swipe a card? At least in my building there's no need. It's hard to imagine random people messing with it.

The low-tech thing has its downsides: the other day the delivery guy wrote down the wrong code so I had to wait for the building manager to open it.

That said, I agree that it works very well. And I think it's a somewhat recent innovation. Apart from my current apartment none of the places I've lived here (10+ years) had lockers.

I have lockers next to the mailbox and I'm in the US. They just put a key to the locker in your box and then you go unlock the locker and the key is 'caught' and won't re-close. Yeah, it's not a perfect system, but it doesn't go out when the power goes down and it isn't going to get taken over by Bratslavian hackers to try to sell my neighbors Viagra via Twitter and even the most tech-illiterate/disabled people can use it fine.

Back when I lived in Seattle, I had Amazon packages delivered to an Amazon Locker precisely because issues like this. Even when I am at home, it is difficult for the delivery person to ring up at the doorbell.

In Australia, Amazon outsourced the lockers to "ParcelPoint", which I believe is a Toll company. The issue is they haven't updated their locker addresses here for years, and I found out the hard way that at least two addresses near me had stopped accepting Amazon packages.

why not use auspost parcel lockers?

Can you guarantee that Amazon's delivery partner, iParcel, won't use a courier which is silently blocked by AusPost?

(I have been using the AusPost ones and I'm having more luck than I used to).

Seriously - if AusPost don't want to accept a delivery they won't even let you know, it's just returned to sender.

I've never had that happen and have had lots of deliveries from both ebay sellers and amazon. Everything has always been delivered

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