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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

I've had 3 of 3 packages go missing in the last two months, all traveling via train through L.A. Either I'm rather unlucky or the thefts are rather thorough. I see some people complaining about their packages being stolen, but if the thefts are that thorough I would expect to see many more. My conspiracy brain can't help but imagine the possibility that discussion of this is being gently suppressed because business don't want people to stop buying things. I've had to stop buying things for now. I hope this is properly resolved soon.

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I placed an order just this month from Costco, with UPS sending three separate "Shipment has left LA" notifications repeating every few days, and the "UPS 3-day delivery" ended up taking over two weeks in the end. The 4th delivery attempt then originated from Canada and did arrive. I didn't have to do anything about it, and it didn't show any errors like "oops we lost the package". This makes me think that they did lose the package(s), and either UPS or Costco just ate the cost.

Wow, it sounds like they did eat the costs, 3 out of 3 for LA again. That does seem rather thorough.

>>Wow, it sounds like they did eat the costs, 3 out of 3 for LA again. That does seem rather thorough.

'they' didn't eat the cost of anything, 'we' are paying the cost thru higher prices on everything we buy.

As they should. The simple solution is to raise the costs to make freight delivery profitable through what is now apparently lawless California. Each Californian served by this route should have to pay a California surcharge to pay for insurance and the cost of reshipping when a train robbery occurs.

Or you know, California could just enforce the law. But the people have voted and spoken.

Yea one of the greatest lies in ecommerce is “free shipping” and now that Amazon has a near monopoly: “free returns.” In fact in a competitive market businesses would undercut each other to the point they can’t do free returns, which is why Amazon started introducing it after they gained market share. Both these seemingly pro-consumer policies (along with zero liability on lost shipments) is really just a mandatory upsell (think shipping insurance), but where the costs are opaque and built into what you already paid.

The nice thing about free returns is that the merchant gets WAY better pricing from shipping companies.

I think people would be OK with a fee for returns, if it wasn't high. But asking people to pay retail for returns is not realistic, and I personally won't shop from stores that make me do that.

I'm not sure about free returns.

Free returns aligns incentive structures to where the vendor loses money if they sell me junk I want to return.

I don't do returns hardly ever, because of the hassle factor. I don't buy from vendors who don't support them, because the amount of scammy behavior goes way up.

I do agree that's one of the nicer effects (but it's not the only thing aligning incentives because there are reviews/reputation measures), but it also upsells you on the cost of all the non-legitimate free returns being made (lack of effort in reading product descriptions, "free rentals", general consumer carelessness, "accidental damage", and such). So at the end of the day the consumers still bear negatives of this structure (increased the costs of this), but the retailer benefits from increased sales.

Also what you say works more for unique direct-from-manufacturer sales and applies less to commodity products sold by Amazon.

There's no need for "free" returns on the PS5 you just bought because that product's reputation is well-known. You're just paying for the retailer's costs to reduce all friction from sales while they get all the benefits.

I think the phrase 'eat the cost' is apt, and I agree that we will pay through higher prices. It would still cost them money that they otherwise would have made. Perhaps the major beneficiaries are the freight insurance companies.

From the articles previously posted, much of what's being targeted and stolen are shipments destined to wholesalers and retailers, not consumers.

If you look at the litter along the tracks in the YouTube videos, you'll see that it's largely small consumer-level packages. I was surprised that there would be containers of those.

Same here. Especially on a train.

Railroads really really hate containers with a passion. Anything that doesn't need to be refrigerated or go on a boat, they will press hard to put it in a boxcar. Or in a 16-foot truck trailer sitting on top of a flatcar (used to see those go by all the time with UPS logos on them).

It's been years since I've seen a boxcar in an actual train. All the trains I see have double-container cars these days but hardly ever an old-school boxcar. They're as rare as a caboose.

I remember helping a local factory tear out all their boxcar lines from their warehouses 25 or 30 years ago to make room for additional racking to fill tractor trailers.

You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.

I used to live out in the middle of nowhere, but 300 feet from the BNSF transcontinental line. It was all boxcars, flatcars, bulk-goods hoppers, and tank cars.

Oh yeah, and the occasional finished airplane minus the wings.

Boxcars are still alive and well, anywhere other than near containerized ocean ports.

Regarding the warehouse, yes, trucking has taken over a massive amount of what used to be rail traffic. No doubt.

  You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.

Sorry, I missed your response. I live near the lane between Detroit and Montreal. In the middle there's a very large intermodel yard north of Toronto. So 90% of what I see behind a train is containers, automobiles, lumber, grain, and tankers. From reading up on it, box cars remain popular with moving paper products, which makes sense to me as you can load much more weight than on a truck and time in transit is less of a concern than with other more sensitive products, less dense products.

That's what I heard as well, they also said thousands of packages. If it was thousands of packages then I would have to have been incredibly unlucky to have 3 for 3 out of thousands. That number must be off by at least a few orders of magnitude. I've also separately heard that Amazon, USPS, and FedEx is being targeted.

Unless you're ordering something that's essentially some form of manufacturer to consumer drop shipping.

Then it could look more like a retail delivery than a consumer one.

They were clearly consumer. I think the reporting is off, I just don’t know why.

Had a package about 2 weeks ago stuck right outside of LA and actually got an unsolicited email from the company to click for a refund.

Wife has one stuck in LA right now.

We've maybe ordered around 10 packages in the last month. Seems pretty significant, I'd love to see an estimate of the impact.

How exactly do you know your packages were "all traveling via train through L.A."?

They have tracking and were last scanned at a train based depo in LA before going missing.

Interesting. Which shipper provides that level of specificity, and do you have to pay extra for it? I've only seen the city name and some value description like "Fedex origin city" or "Fedex hub"

Given how large LA is, it would be reasonable to have the port, railhead, airport and local distribution centres as separate locations on the tracking list.

I see things like "Prague Airport FedEx hub" with FedEx in Europe.

> I've had 3 of 3 packages go missing in the last two months

Did the packages get replaced?

Refunds / replacements are in progress. I think customer service is a bit stretched at the moment. I'm not sure about the law but I think you have to receive the item to be considered to have taken delivery.

I see, I guess I figured that the merchant would detect that the package was never delivered and just ship another product on their end.

Maybe I was a bit optimistic.

They are smaller boutique vendors and USPS and FedEx still have the packages as 'in transit'. Only the first package is considered lost by USPS and that was after 6 weeks of no updates and two escalations. At that time I had no idea train thefts were going on. The goods are expensive and low margin. I imagine it's not typically worth insuring though as it would normally be worth playing the odds. I would imagine having so much systemic theft at the same time would be crushing such vendors.

If they are stealing USPS packages, won’t the feds or federal postal cops get involved?

I would imagine they’re overwhelmed atm. I think being a serious crime has kept the theft down for some time. Before this I’ve only had one package go missing in 10 years and I think that’s because the package was super tiny and got lost.

I think it's hilarious. LA is getting what they voted for.

Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>My conspiracy brain can't help but imagine the possibility that discussion of this is being gently suppressed because business don't want people to stop buying things

who cares? the merchant is shouldering the risk of theft, not me. if the price is good I'll still buy it.

If the word came out that your two/three day delivery is going to now take two weeks people would probably shop differently. There's a lot of stuff I don't buy locally because going to the store that has it on the Bay Area is expensive as I don't have a car. If shipping is going to be between one day or two weeks because logistics are unreliable I'd consider the expense.

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