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Comment by simmonmt | Hacker News Reader

Deliveries left unsecured on a doorstop is a common practice in the US, typically found in low-crime residential areas. It was by no means invented by Amazon -- it's been a thing for a long time.

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This is very common even in higher density suburbs. Unless an area is known to have a crime issue, it's standard practice in the U.S. to leave the package on the front steps. I've lived in the burbs for the vast majority of my life and have never had a package stolen. Despite common media portrayals, the U.S. is mostly a very nice place to live.

If you have a good income

I feel like Europeans often forget just how big the USA is. I live in a major metro. Just like in EU, it would be ludicrous to leave a package on someones doorstep.

But if you live in a rural area, things are completely different. Which from my understanding is the same as EU for the most part.

In the past 20 years, I've lived across the major metro areas of Seattle, Silicon Valley, and now Los Angeles. in all places, it's been common practice for delivery companies to leave packages outside unless the shipper has specified otherwise for a high-value or theft-prone item.

Over literally thousands of deliveries during that time, the number that have disappeared mysteriously is under 1%. In fact, more have not been delivered at all (i.e., fraud on the part of the delivery person) than have been stolen.

1% is pretty high theft rate. 1% means if you get a package every week, once in 2 years one will be stolen. Or it means in a city of 100,000 1000 people will have thefts of their packages.

"Around the country, more than 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing every day" (no indication what % this is)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/online-shopping-...

A different way of looking at it is, with ~5 packages that were likely stolen out of 2,000 or so delivered, that's about a 1/4% loss rate, which is much lower than the typical retail store suffers from shoplifting.

So, it's pretty much priced into their margins already.

Its pretty common in non-rural areas in the US. I live in a suburban area and its normal. Some of my coworkers who live downtown have had issues with porch pirates, so I'm assuming they have porch drop off as well.

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