Would I pay $6.99 for it? Probably not. But is it "meh"? No, I think it solves an actual problem, possibly in enough of a way to build a sustainable business.
0) Often loses packages (~25% of the time)
1) Does not re-attempt delivery under any circumstances
2) Is unbelievably crowded by customers who are enraged by 3)
3) Staffed by people who do not care about their jobs at all
4) Has a minimum wait of 30 minutes to get your package
Is 30 minutes of my time plus transit to and fro worth more than seven bucks? Probably yes.
I've been using private mailbox services for nearly 2 decades now and they have it all over the USPS PO. 24-hour package pickup. They throw away junkmail for you. They will text you when you have a package. They can accept shipments from any carrier - USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.
They will forward mail in batches to another address, say you moved out of state but still want your old address to keep working for another 6 months. If you file a change-of-address form with the USPS they sell that info to anybody with a couple of dollars (like your college alumni association and any other charity you ever donated to). Some will even open your mail for you, scan it and email it to you.
Plus, the address looks like an apartment but it is not your home address - so telling someone where to mail you doesn't also tell them where you live.
No more post office nightmares.
"Deliveries can include one or more packages."
Idk if I missed that before or if they just added it.
The reason is that the software that FedEx, UPS, etc use to plan routes doesn't have something which maps P.O. box numbers to the street address of the post office that they are contained in. And from what I can tell the USPS doesn't publish that database, so even if FedEx, etc really really wanted to, they couldn't without spending several million (or more) to map them all manually.
It's unfortunate that it's not terribly convenient, but once you know the street address of the post office that your P.O box is located at, it's not a problem at all.
Congress passed a law in 2001 requiring any commercial entity to receive mail for another to submit a Form 1583A registering with their local post office as Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA). And then all their customers are required to complete a regular Form 1583 which is designed "verify" their identity and prevent mail fraud.
If they go without the CMRA the USPS can't legally deliver anything to them for their customers so all the small stuff you buy off of Amazon, eBay, etc are all right out. And for a lot of that stuff you're not going to know ahead of time if someone is going to send it via USPS or UPS or FedEx because it'll go whichever way is cheapest.
If they do the CMRA route then getting new customers is a big pain in the ass. I know this because I used to work for a well known CMRA and it was the Achilles heel of the business.
Perhaps it works because you can't send it to them by USPS so they'll never be the cheapest route.
Presumably when Amazon, say, are sending out an item they arrange the collection using some form of API and choose the optimal (by price I expect) delivery route. USPS would simply not be listed and so Amazon would route to Luna as expected.
Maybe it doesn't work like that, just a suggestion.
Everyone's software doesn't check names in any way whatsoever. I could send a package to: President Abe Lincoln 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington DC 20500
FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, everyone's software would eat that right up and spit out a label. That's because the name portion of the address usually doesn't mean anything. The White House is where it is irrespective of the person receiving the mail there.
Furthermore nearly all of the time this isn't an issue. The vast majority of all mail and packages go to the right address. People tend not to have items shipped to anyone but themselves or perhaps relatives. That's the reason there's a law that writes an exception to normal mail delivery only in the case where someone's doing it as a business (a CMRA).
And the only reason there's an exception there is that some (not all) CMRA owners 10-15 years ago didn't seem to care about preventing fraud and enough people got scammed to where it was a problem. It's expensive to scrutinize the incoming mail enough and that meant that the people who didn't scrutinize had higher profits so there was no corrective feedback through profits and losses. The only way to fix that was to make it a legal issue instead of an economic one.
Check out Parcel: http://fromparcel.com. Just launched for New Yorkers without doormen. Get your packages delivered on your schedule. And the best part? It's totally free through January 15.
While this service isn't exactly revolutionary, it could put pressure on competitors to improve their customer experience. I think the end game (as does Amazon apparently) is sub-30 minute deliveries done using energy-efficient and autonomous technology, but that is a ways away, but at the very least, incremental improvements by upstarts will put pressure on the industry as a whole to improve their services (think about it, why doesn't Fedex/UPS already offer evening services to residential areas, they should have been doing this years ago).
In this case, Luna could actually cut down the number of delivery attempts per package, and potentially reduce the carbon footprint of the delivery.
You are underestimating how much people are willing to pay for awesome convenience.
If this service was in Seattle (and I didn't live in an apartment complex that essentially provides this service for free) I'd use it.
Meanwhile, one delivery guy can probably handle 10+ deliveries an hour. One guy can easily save us a work-week every night.
The guy who delivers lunch to a company can be delivering the lunch of 100+ people every day. Even if it only saves 10 minutes per person, he's just saved 16 man-hours.
What does it take to qualify as "important" to you?