90k Packages Disappear Daily in NYC
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here (Germany) if you aren’t home (and haven’t given special instructions which could include leaving the package outside) it’s either given to a neighbor, a package-holding place or goes to the post office for you to get.
I trust some of my neighbors to bring me my mail and/or packages if there was an issue delivering them but there are a few that I absolutely do _not_ trust, either because they would just keep the package for themselves or throw it out, or because I don't see them often and they might just plain forget about it for a few days or weeks.
Otherwise, yes, packages will just be left wherever in front of your door.
An abundance of packages disappear in both systems. Although if your package happens to be left at a local Spati/Bodega/corner store instead of with a neighbor the German system works out pretty well.
Well, they are supposed to tell you where they left the package. In that case I’d probably tell the sender it wasn’t delivered and leave the delivery service to bear the cost if they can’t remember where it ended up.
> And what if it was left with a neighbor who has a schedule opposite yours and you don't have a phone number for?
I find that improbable. But if after a few days there was no contact whatsoever I’d simply drop a note with my phone number in their mailbox reminding them that I have their package ;)
> An abundance of packages disappear in both systems.
Never had problems unless it was Hermes, and even that is somewhat rare (happened twice in 15 years), but then I live in a vastly smaller city (pop 200k) than Berlin.
The weirdest part about seeing so many of my neighbors' packages is how much I learn about their consumption habits. There's the lady who orders two big boxes of cat food whenever there's a discount, the guy who uses his Amazon Prime account to its fullest, the guy who ordered a 50-inch TV without telling his wife (who came to collect the package), the guy who ordered a bunch of different hats (he didn't like the first few after trying them on), the guy who orders tools and parts for his motorcycle...
I recently had to stake out a Walgreens and wait for the driver to show up to actually get a package before it was returned to the sender.
I'm also fortunate that my nearest grocery store has an Amazon Locker, which I use as much as I can when purchasing from Amazon -- that grocery is also opened until midnight.
They don't however fallback to the local post office when undeliverable, which is the point here.
I've lived in very rural small towns in California, and it required developing a personal relationship with the post office staff/postmaster and UPS driver to have undeliverable packages left at the local post office. The post office employees were technically bending the rules for me. But we had so few local residents it wasn't a significant problem.
They deliver to a PO BOX, but you pay for that service
I've had rural USPS staff become accepting of my non-USPS delivered packages as a personal favor, but never any sort of formalized process.
The formal path is the $78/yr PO BOX, otherwise they're oftentimes downright hostile towards accepting non-USPS deliveries freely for randoms.
Are you just referring to USPS-deliveries? That's different, since postage is being paid.
Can you provide a URL to anything describing this
I've been using this for years. It totally solves the porch-piracy problem.
There is already 6 000 of them.
https://antyweb.pl/tego-jeszcze-nie-bylo-inpost-obniza-ceny-...
When I lived in a duplex or single family home it’s left at the front door or garage. There’s no way I’d want my neighbor to have my packages. One neighbor is weird and the other opened my wife’s package when she messed up our address right when we moved in.
Condos can present a weird situation for packages delivered by small 3rd parties delivery companies. Amazon delivery services didn’t have the codes to get in like FedEx/UPS/USPS or keys to the lock boxes.
Remember US and Europe have much different living situations, NYC is dense and similar to Europe but the rest of the US is not. People in NYC have more of a not my problem or not dealing with this BS attitude and rightfully so.
I live in a condo with keyfob access, and Amazon and Lazership are able to deliver right to my door. It probably depends on the condo management. Personally, I like the system I have right now; my neighbors could potentially steal my packages, but that's pretty unlikely, and random people off the street can't easily get in, so it's generally safe to leave packages at people's doors. I have a neighbor across the hall who's had some packages sitting in front of their door for a week now (they've probably been on vacation).
If I owned a single-family home and had a bunch of time on my hands, I'd probably engineer a drop box of some kind that shippers can drop my packages into, but that other people can't get them out of.
If you honestly gave that some thought, it's not an easy problem to solve. Otherwise, I'm sure that the Amazon Home Locker would be a thing.
The main problem is multiple deliveries - how do you make a box that can lock and unlock (automatically or otherwise) for -only- delivery companies and drivers, for multiple deliveries and packages per day - but not allow others to do so?
Remember, the drivers and delivery people have very limited time to deliver packages; they won't read instructions, or even pay nominal attention to them. You won't be able to give them (or the company) some kind of RFID key fob or other item to use to open the locker (because you are only a single address, not a large company with "pull power" and a contracted service agreement - and even then, maybe not). There's also the possibility of freelance or other kinds of "couriers" that likely drive their own vehicles and have no other delivery identification (I've had packages delivered to my door by cab drivers in a marked cab - supposedly shipped by UPS).
I recall one kickstarter where the idea was a "pad" that packages could be put on, but if the pad or a package was removed, an alarm would go off (it also had some kind of camera and email notification capability). IIRC, it got funded, but I have no idea how well the idea worked. Likely, it probably didn't work well at all - simply because delivery people probably didn't use it, or didn't understand to stack packages on top of other deliveries, etc.
I'd personally love a solution for this problem, and so would tons of other people affected by "porch pirates" stealing their packages. My solution is the old fashioned way: Have them delivered to my employer. But this solution isn't available to everyone, unfortunately.
Alternatively most shopping places already allow you to enter delivery instructions where you enter gate codes for unattended gated communities you could just provide them the key code there.
If neither of those would work for reasonably sized packages (ie no TVs) a larger box could have an airlock section like the clothing donation boxes where packages can't be retrieved because they're behind a second door.
Really though I think the actual solution is a combination of more prevalent generic lock boxes, like where Amazon or UPS setup drop locations but made so any company can use them, or partnering with grocery stores or gas stations to hold packages.
[0] Either with you entering it in or going through things like UPS MyChoice and the Fedex and USPS equivalents.
No it's not perfect with obvious drawbacks (more than one package coming), but is probably "good enough."
The deliver guy comes... push the ring... you answer it on your phone and unlocks the box from it.
I used the term "drop box" for a reason. You don't need to let drivers unlock the box. It's a drop box: they drop the boxes into it. It's just like a mail slot: the postperson puts the mail in, but can't get it back out. It doesn't require special access or knowledge to use; it would be just like a trash or laundry chute.
The challenge with this is retrofitting some kind of chute so stuff doesn't just drop 8+ ft to a hard floor, and this also requires having an underground floor where the boxes go. Of course, this isn't going to work for something like a 65" TV, but for most packages it's quite doable.
I get my stuff delivered to work most of the time because of this.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-deliv...
[1] (pdf) https://depts.washington.edu/sctlctr/sites/default/files/SCT...
I hear that area has improved now, but certainly back then...
For my apartment complex, generally the carriers will just leave it at your door. However, at this time of year, USPS won't even attempt to deliver packages and takes them all to the office and makes the office text/email recipients (I don't think this is legal and I've complained about it but no one cared) and the other carriers (except for Amazon delivering themselves) will knock and if you don't answer in the time it takes them to scan the bar code they'll take it back to the distribution center for UPS and to the FedEx office a couple miles away for FedEx packages.
This is purely done as a response to theft.
At my current apartments I have had some Amazon packages go 'out for delivery' then just never come. Most recently this happened 2 weeks ago and Amazon issued a refund as a gift card balance. In this case it was just 10$~ of microfiber eyeglass cloths.
When I still lived in a house 2 years ago, I'd regularly have Amazon packages taken off my porch that was 20 ft from the street and blocked by bushes. I never had any plain brown boxes taken though, only stuff with the Amazon tape. Fortunately a lot of the stuff was garbage I was getting for free to review and the few times it was something I paid for Amazon would reship or issue a refund without hesitation.
Without running the numbers I'd say my personal theft rate is probably below 1% in the apartment and probably below 10% when I was at the house.
[0] https://people.howstuffworks.com/when-postal-carrier-deliver...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-deliv...
But I'm sure it's possible to lockpick the door or do something else to the locker, as it was an outside 24/7 one. fairly unlikely though.
As it stands, these statements are vacuous. Context helps. And to be honest, it seems like people making these statements haven't ever been to the "less developed world". America isn't perfect, but if you're going to just blanket write stuff like this, at least be prepared to back it up with examples.
Sure there are some dim spots, like the huge number of bridges that badly need renovation and the frequent need to replace old lead pipes, but it's fairly uncommon to notice the infrastructure in most states. And that's pretty high praise for infrastructure.
IMO there are plenty of good arguments that our social institutions are in a worse state than most other nations, but our physical infrastructure doesn't seem to be going to ruin just yet.
But I've had quite a few packages delivered to the wrong address and our lobby constantly has wrong deliveries of both USPS mail and packages. Usually the Ave/Street are mixed up or off-by-one or a digit in the street number is different from ours.
We once had a huge box of pet food from China mostly blocking our main egress for a week until we found the person it was supposed to go to.
It's a nuisance that the city should fix.
There should be a federal law against this kind of stupidity. It's unbelievable that many towns and cities actually thought it'd be a good idea to have two different streets with the exact same name, but one is an "Avenue" and one is a "street". I have a relative who lives on a "Second Ave" and has had all kinds of problems with mail because there's another address in that same small town with the same house number, but on "Second Street", and the person there is not cooperative when mis-addressed mail goes there.
Their "investigations" will reveal one story, but my security camera reveals another, and even management doesn't care that my building's deliveries are never made because the drivers just slap the sticker and move on.
1) the value of goods seems off. How can the average package only be 15 bucks? ( I wonder if they are keeping the costs down to deter people from stealing 2) What the heck is "Sustainable Urban Freight Systems?"
>Gabriel Cepeda, 23, came up with the idea for a start-up company built around collecting packages, called Pickups Technologies, after his own Amazon order of computer hard drives was stolen last year outside of his parents’ home in New Jersey. He spent hours on the phone trying to get his order replaced. “It was bad enough to motivate me to brainstorm,” he said.Now Mr. Cepeda’s company connects online shoppers with a network of about 30 residents in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg who will accept packages at their homes at all hours, for fees ranging from $4.99 for a single delivery, to $9.99 for a monthly service. The company plans to expand to more neighborhoods.
Decent idea, but the liability has to be insane. I think he would need to grow rather large in order to cover insurance costs if God forbid a few of these people decided to sue if something valuable were damaged/stolen.
It literally sounds like finding people who are not working ( retired, elderly, stay at home, disabled, etc, ) who are home at x time per day. Sounds like a crazy optimization problem.
>In New York, the police do not break out stolen packages into a separate category. Instead, these cases generally fall under grand larceny if an item is valued at more than $1,000, or petit larceny if valued at less.
With all that budget, why cannot they keep statistics on package theft? Seems like the city is behind the times.
If my buying pattern is typical for your average Prime user, $15 per package isn't completely outrageous.
Explosive decoy packages.
Besides, losing occasional packages is still less expensive than having to operate a retail store front in Manhattan!
;)
UPS/FedEx packages that need a signature are a pain, you can't do anything until they try to deliver at least once. Then you have to drive to the hub which is either by the airport or the next town over and pick it up, their hours suck.
FedEx lets you re-route your package to the local Walgreens, which I really find useful.
The UW grads that sold it to Google were borderline arrogant about it, boldly assumptive about how they were going to change how packages were delivered in Canada. That was 10 years ago and of course nothing has happened.
I suggest there are some fairly simple technological solutions along those lines (i.e. a series of larger boxes in each building with a temp code) that could really work, but that the USPS etc. are fundamentally not interested in doing anything innovative. Private entities just aren't positioned to do this, as the pervasive nature of 'mail' is something that lends to socialised/government action.
I really wish UPS/FedEx/Amazon would get together in this because collectively they have enough power to lobby/influence enough cities to create a critical mass for this, and they have the incentive and operational capabilities to do it.
Making boxes available for purchase for homes, having everything standardised etc. and the legal issues sorted out around it would be so beneficial.
It's one area where we hardly need 'new tech' rather some 'operational innovation' at scale.
I buy a lot more locally, but there's just a lot of things that need to be purchased online these days.
If theft is a big problem in your society, then it isn't really that civilized.
This is a cultural issue that needs correction starting in schools where it gets repeated day and day out to respect others and the property of others. Then top this off with not accepting politicians who incite negative behavior by telling people their situation was caused by others whose gains were unfairly acquired. It is far easier for people to reason theft if someone in authority gives them that scenario, that people who have more than them probably did it unfairly and it is not just that they lack the same.
Maybe you meant it exactly this way, but I can't tell if you were referring to Democrats or Republicans, because both have the same message about different groups.