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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

If you're concerned about package thieves, just buy an outdoor cabinet and put it next to your door with a note asking that packages be placed in it. I use an Ikea Josef:

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/outdoo...

You don't even need a lock for it. If you can get the deliverymen to consistently place packages in it, the thieves will have no idea if there's actually a package at your door to steal or not without actually attempting a theft. For extra deterrence, you can install a motion activated camera next to it. The idea is to reduce the thieves' expectation of reward while increasing their expectation of getting caught.

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Yeah, we had a package stolen off our porch, so we did that. It's a bench with a liftable top. The plan was to put a padlock on it. All of our packages are addressed to:

  Shaftway
  Place in Bench - Code 1234
  24601 Where I Live St.
  My City, ST, ZipZipZip

We order a lot of stuff, and probably average 3 deliveries per day. In the last 3 months we've had exactly one package placed in the bench. And we never even got around to putting the padlock on it. All a delivery person has to do is lift the lid. Delivery people don't care. I probably wouldn't either if I were one. I'm not going to read the boxes I'm delivering for instructions; I'm just going to leave it on the porch like I do with 99.99% of other boxes.

We have a foot high fence in front of our door.

That plus a grassy slope is enough to hide the packages from street view.

Our neighbor across the street gets their packages stolen often. I have never had any package stolen, and I order 100x times as many packages.

To be frank, I had to read it a couple times before parsing "Place in Bench - Code 1234" as "Delivery person, please put this parcel inside the bench, using the code 1234". We expect addresses to be data, not executable code.

Refactoring suggestions welcome. I don't think there's enough room for an if-clause, definitely not a for-loop.

They key is to put yourself into the mindset of a hurried deliveryman and design your system around that.

I have a sign low on my door right where a deliveryman would leave a package that asks him to put it in the box (with a simple message in big text, a big red arrow pointing towards the box and a photo of it with a package inside). There's no lock to get in his way.

Deliverymen from all carriers use my box about 90% of the time they want to deliver to my doorstep.

For Amazon specifically (since their deliverymen are gig workers), I entered address-specific delivery instructions into their system, mainly so I could complain about their performance more effectively. I think the actual, physical sign is more effective.

I have a camera watching the porch and have a few videos of deliverymen doing a double-take on the sign, then putting the package in the box.

I used to write delivery instructions in the address, but some delivery companies would pretty consistently cross out that line with a black marker.

They get it all the way to the porch? I've had USPS people leave packages in the driveway because walking the 25' feet from the vehicle to the porch is too much to expect.

I honestly don't blame the drivers. It's not just your house. Consider the number of packages they have to deliver and the cumulative amount of time this adds to their route. I've seen estimates that a typical residential driver delivers something like 150-200 packages per day. Even an extra 30 seconds per package adds up to over an hour of additional time to complete their route.

The incentive structure simply isn't set up to reward a delivery driver taking that extra effort. In fact, it explicitly punishes it.

150-200 packages is a really light route, 150-200 stops and 300-400 packages is more accurate. This time of year, 250+ stops for a residential route isn't particularly unusual.

Biggest reason to leave a package at the driveway is a fence/gate. A fence keeps stuff in or out, either way, not respecting that is how you end up with stories like this: https://www.khq.com/news/responders-ram-driveway-gate-to-sav...

That link is the first time ever I've gotten a HTTP 451 response. Interesting.

Yeah this is really annoying.

Train them with a small post it note + incentive small candy

"Carrier Service - Place package in box, take a candy, and remove this note."

I have had good experiences with people delivering packages and caring about how obvious it is that there are packages out. When I lived a row of townhouses, the front doors of the houses were very exposed and visible from the street. So if we didn't answer the door when a package was delivered, they would bring it around to our back porch and set it over the fence.

However, this did result in one of the delivery drivers not correctly counting how many from the end our townhouse was and put it on the wrong porch...

One time UPS left a 2ft x 3ft x 1ft box under my doormat. I appreciated the effort, but the package was not inconspicuous.

I've seen that a few times too. I wonder if it is actually to try to protect it from rain?

It's for both really. That's the best one can come up with given the circumstances.

Putting a note on the inside of the bench with the bench lid already open seems like a pretty good idea. having a bench with a liftable top is also pretty good since having a bench outdoors is pretty nice too.

But then the thieves would know if there is a package because the lid would be down.

Only if they are able to remember which house has a bench with a liftable top. It might not be effective against a thief who lives nearby, but it would keep the package out of plain sight for the ones cruising around in cars.

> average 3 deliveries per day

Wow. I really wonder what the environmental impact is of just one household doing this. I think I order something once every.. two months maybe? Three? And if I could get the desired electronics in a local store, I probably would.

Edit: To reply to the three initial comments at once, I see your point. I was thinking "but it's not just about the last mile, it's about getting that package all the way from China or where ever it comes from"... but of course, if I buy it in a store, it still had to come from china. Someone driving to your home all day seems terrible at first impression, but even without grouping the deliveries, I guess it might not be much worse than someone who gets groceries by car. I'd be interested to hear about research that looked into the topic.

Assuming there are other nearby deliveries (there always are), then you driving to the local store to buy it would pollute much more.

Compared to someone who leaves their home by car once per day to get routine items, it's arguably a lot better since that delivery truck makes hundreds of deliveries per round trip.

Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure, it's more impactful.

Perspective always matters.

>Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure, it's more impactful.

That's being disingenuous. There are plenty of more moderate options which are perfectly viable for the vast majority of households, like planning a small amount know advance and getting essentials twice a week, or integrating it into other trips (commuting, school runs, coffee runs, walks).

>topic being environmental impact

>coffee runs

Can't you just brew coffee yourself if you care about the enviromental impact?

Absolutely, but my point was simply that people are already leaving their houses for necessity/pleasure, and if they need a daily trip to a shop they should combine their trips, regardless of the reason for said trip

I mean, how is it environmentally worse that one guy go make a whole bunch of deliveries to a whole bunch of people vs one guy driving to the store and back?

Couldn't you make the argument that the distance being traveled for OP's packages is only the distance between the package immediately before and after his package?

The product is getting delivered to your house both ways, it's just that one is by you and the other isn't. It's not as bad as you make it seem.

Really only half the distance between the stop before and after. There is also the fact that extra packaging is necessary when an item is shipped versus picking it up in a store. I don't have a great idea on how to measure this impact.

Yeah, we don't go out to shop much. There are reasons. We tried bundling up Amazon purchases into one big purchase per week, but it'd still come in {n} boxes via {m} carriers. And that's just from Amazon.

I wish there was a way to centralize it into a single staging area for the region and then deliver things in batches, but that won't satisfy the "I NEED IT ASAP" kinds of people.

> Wow. I really wonder what the environmental impact is of just one household doing this. I think I order something once every.. two months maybe? Three? And if I could get the desired electronics in a local store, I probably would.

You didn't state it, at least not as of this writing, but the responses are about gas/emissions waste of individual trips to the store. For that home delivery is probably break even.

There's also the aspect of individual delivery packaging. All that cardboard, foam, plastic and tape vs store delivery which are palletized and bulk packaged.

I've found it similarly ineffective. I have my packages addressed to "_sparky, Leave at Back Door, 123 My Street". Maybe 5% of them end up there.

I work from home full time, and get typically 1-2 a day. I have a sign that says "Please ring bell for deliveries, home all day!" on my front porch and it's never rung. Packages just tossed on the porch. Amazon I get a notification on Alexa sometimes before the UPS guy is back to his truck though, so that helps.

Contrast to that - before I moved to this house, my old UPS guy used to honk and wave if he saw me walking down the street, knew me by name and would knock every time.

This is one of the things I love about living outside the city. UPS, USPS, DHL, and FedEx drivers all know me by name, honk and wave, and stash my packages safely 98% of the time. Its as good as it gets. Never miss a pickup, or a sign-for. Magical, yet should be expected. I am still bummed that milk delivery ceased last year. It was like living in a 1950s propaghanda film.

> Delivery people don't care.

Delivery people don't have time to care. They aren't even reading the labels you know.

That is way too logical, that is where the problem is. The delivery driver didn't end up being a delivery driver by virtue of literacy and logic.

You have something tantamount to public/private key cryptography going on there!

Back to the video, I observed that a lot of the thieves talk to themselves out loud. They probably refer to themselves in the third person when talking to someone. Clearly they can't think before they open their mouths, something people should master being able to do as a ten year old. Maybe the only time they think is when they open their mouths, thinking and talking being the same thing to them.

If the secret shadowy people that rule the world in some conspiracy really had plans to depopulate the world then they should get the NSA to track everyone that talks to themselves, select these folk for the depopulation program and then this theft from doorsteps problem would be gone.

How about offering a tip if they place the package in the box? Add instructions: place package in box, take $5 tip from box.

Of course that might make a code lock more important.

Interesting cultural difference? Where I live, packages either: get delivered in person, placed somewhere secure, handed to the neighbours (who sign for it), withheld, or delivered to a service point. They never end up on a porch. And not just because we don't have porches either. Point is, they're not left in public view.

In the video we see many people stealing from porches with video cameras, and the author mentions that the police didn't take action even with video evidence.

While I think your suggestion would reduce the chance of theft, I think you overestimate the accuracy of the risk-benefit analysis happening in the thieves' minds, as well as the actual risk involved.

I mean, the activity is already dumb from a risk analysis point of view.

But if they don't know of a package, they won't try to steal it. That is the area that I do think would do well.

I don't think the video evidence is meant to help the police (or, obviously, to deter the thieves), but it's useful for requesting a replacement from the shipper.

I don't think the shippers are responsible for any theft that's not caused by their staff.

Does anyone know the answer to this? I'm very curious. I actually wonder if it would be worse to report that you have video evidence of a thief, because they may no longer be liable (hey, we delivered it to where it had to go, rest is up to you) vs just saying 'it never got here'.

I can’t speak for everywhere but in the UK most places will send you a replacement if the item was left on a porch and then stolen rather than with your neighbors. That is considered a failure of the delivery company.

Further to that point, I haven’t even needed to provide evidence of stuff having been stolen. Which seems like a system ripe for abuse but it’s nice that it’s weighted in the customers favour for a change.

Thankfully I’ve not needed to complain about stolen stuff in a long while, partly because generally stuff is tossed over a fence or left with neighbors. But mostly because I now live in a quiet village so I don’t get the same kind of passing opportunists like I did when I lived on a busy school road.

You haven't taken receipt of the package by it being dumped on your doorstep. (I suppose with the exception of a delivery instruction 'leave on doorstep'...) While it may not be 'their fault', the choice of courier and their instructions is; it's also to some extent a cost of doing business.

That said, I seldom see or have stuff left outside in the UK - assuming no 'if out' instruction - the vast majority of the time it's a 'sorry we missed you' note or occasionally with a neighbour/over the wall.

There's a lot of discretion, I think - it's a customer service issue primarily, but I generally haven't had to provide any evidence (but I imagine if I claimed some high percentage of all my orders from one merchant were stolen, they'd demand proof or ultimately refuse to accept my orders).

Problem is that some package thieves just trail behind the delivery truck. So even if hidden, they know it's there.

From what I've heard, they typically trail a block or more behind the delivery truck, which means they can't often see the exact houses that get packages. Their goal isn't to see where they're delivered, but to get to them before anyone else does.

If they trail too closely, they'll make the deliveryman suspicious.

And what the deliverman is going to do? Slow down his deliveries?

> And what the deliverman is going to do? Slow down his deliveries?

Call the police, obviously. Everyone has a mobile telephone these days.

Doing so even makes sense from a business perspective, as the carrier may have to pay the insurance on all the stolen packages.

For package thieves most of the problem is solved, at least for those at home most of the time, like me, by simply having the delivery man RING THE BELL. Why this is not common practice for all deliverers, UPS/FEDEX/AZ etc. is beyond me. If the delivery man is already at the front porch all he has to do is reach for the bell. If the recipient knows about it he can be prompt, prompter than the thieves...

Just had a story the other day about a delivery man working with his friends to steal packages. He would deliver then text his buddies the address.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.wftv.com/news/local/seasonal-...

One fun psychological hack for this - paint an eye above or on said locker.

This is backed by research. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-22270052

@jdb here on HN had, at one time, installed a very conspicuous camera housing on his house although it had no camera in it.

Psychological deterrence.

It would be fun to have it do motion tracking (could use directional audio to track). It always freaks people out when a camera like device is following their movement.

"Ooh! I'll take the package and the fancy tracking camera" :-)

Yeah, this is why I would be a lousy package thief, I'd love to find a cool gizmo like this and take it apart and figure out how it works. Not some boring iPad or game console :-)

If you wonder "Who would carry a portable spectrum analyzer while walking along a street of Christmas light displays in order to see what wireless systems were being employed to control them?" that would be me.

takes out a screw-driver, begins lengthy and conspicuous disassembly process (-:

Actually I've always wondered about such a heist.

If I were going to pull off a heist in broad daylight, I'd get some cones and print a Rolex logo on a safety vest and pull a van up to the Rolex town clock in Carmel and "take it in for repairs" in broad daylight.

Anyone have directions to the actual factory??

Wyze cam Pan will do this for 30 bucks if you're looking for a product and not a tinkering project.

At the point we're talking about a fake camera, directional audio is probably overkill. Just put one of those cheap motion trackers up that turns on lights and hook it up to a relatively loud actuator that shows that camera moving very slowly for 3-4 seconds.

Sound to draw attention if they didn't already see it, movement so they think it's smart enough to track them or someone is controlling it, and it looks like a camera so they think they are being recorded.

Or just get an actual camera and set it to track back and forth. Most of them have that option.

Yeah, at this point wifi cameras are cheap enough there's not really a reason not to just put a real one up instead of this. 15-30 years ago this might have been a good strategy though. Back then any sort of network enabled camera was kinda pricey, as well as the system to run it.

While not the cheapest, the best wifi camera I've found so far was to build one from a RasPi Zero W, and install motionEyeOS on it.

From there, you could add simple motion tracking (OpenCV or something like that - there's enough in the distro to easily do blob tracking) and command a servo to track.

Total cost for the basic camera setup (not the tracking extra) was around $60.00 - and you don't have to pay for a cloud service or anything like that (I just have it email me the images), plus it's open source, so you can vet the codebase if you need or want.

Actually, it had a camera. It was an ordinary webcam but it was mounted in a very conspicuous, conventional security camera housing.

a very conspicuous camera housing on his house although it had no camera in it.

Radio Shack used to sell these in the 80's.

A guy I knew who worked at one said easily half of the cameras in his mall were fake RS shells.

Full text of the article cited on the author's website:

https://www.danielnettle.org.uk/download/131.pdf

This is one of the psychology results that failed to replicate [1] in the replication crisis [2].

[1]: Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: two meta-analyses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Reminds of 1984. Big brother is watching

I've been wondering why Amazon oriented their smart lock delivery service to an orwellian camera and lock in the home setup instead of hooked to an outdoor box like this.

Because they want to deliver groceries into your fridge in the near future.

I can only imagine that in my case (if I were dumb enough to use such a service):

After getting past my barking dogs (plus the small one that likes to bite people) - they'd get to the fridge, the dogs would shut up ("the person is going to the magic box where good tasting things come from - maybe they'll drop something!"), open up the fridge...

...then get to "play tetris" trying to fit the crap inside an already full unit.

Even worse in terms of invasiveness.

The lessor known service allows you to deliver to your car's trunk:

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17051031011

Full disclosure: I work on this: https://www.getboxlock.com/

Neat. Does it somehow know which barcodes belong to your packages, or could a thief rip a barcode off any package and use it to unlock it?

Yes, it knows which packages belong to you. It will only unlock if the package is being delivered to that specific lock and the package is "out for delivery".

I honestly don't really see this working? What incentive does the delivery driver have to spend more time scanning the box (place the label in view for the barcode scanner), unlock, open the door, place box, relock it

I can 100% imagine the driver just putting the box on top and leaving, or trying quickly to scan and have it fail then again put the box on top.

This is probably the biggest roadblock to this product's success. However BoxLock is in talks with all the major carriers to provide training. The carriers themselves are incentivized to use BoxLock because it provides a guarantee that the package was delivered successfully and securely. They don't want packages stolen either.

You can add delivery instructions to most shipments that tells the delivery driver to use BoxLock.

I do this with a patio box, but added a door sensor that transmits to our alarm/home automation system and triggers a recording from the camera aimed at that area and a push notification to my phone. UPS is good at putting packages in the box. On good days, FedEx might get them in the vicinity of the porch.

The Josef might be worth stealing though.

https://www.getboxlock.com

With all due respect, this sounds like the wrong solution.

(1) It's too much of a hassle. Delivery drivers probably won't bother (2) What's to stop a thief from scanning a fake barcode?

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