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Comment by shaftway | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> Delivery people don't care.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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