I really don’t like the look of this. Giving a delivery driver effective access into your home (or even a part of it like your garage) is likely to end in problems for some people. I can easily foresee codes being passed from a delivery driver to his mate Bill The Burglar and then what?
When we had our porch rebuilt recently, I had one of these one-way trap parcel boxes installed. Purely mechanical and pretty damned near as secure as you can get for that sort of money:
In my neighborhood, there are quite a few people (mostly mentally unstable) wandering onto porches. In daylight. Some stare in windows and try doors to see if they are unlocked (even when they’ve seen residents through the windows). They’ll carry away a box when there are witnesses walking by. I wouldn’t confront them; you might if you are big and threatening-looking. Our police claim to have no resources to deal with this.
So, alas, a bunch of not-locked boxes wouldn’t do the job. Neither would leaving the packages out of sight from the street.
Of course, I live in the paradise of Portland Oregon USA, where we collect mentally ill people and “house” them on our streets. It has been possible (at least historically) to survive winter outside here. More so than Seattle, so runaways and unhoused people from the surrounding right-wing regions come here.
Aside: as many have mentioned here, in the US the delivery drivers give not one shit. I’ve read quite a bit about how big corporations (ahem, Amazon) hire delivery contract firms that are very abusive employers of drivers. In the US, this seems to shield the corporation from consequences.
I’ve had a mixed bag with amazon drivers; some actually do read the directions, which includes the code to the parcel box I have mounted in the carport, some put the package behind it, and others put it “in the vicinity” of the front door, mailbox, or the carport door. USPS usually drops boxes in the carport near the box or door, and UPS/Fedex/OnTrack/Etc. is a complete guessing game.
This. You could just have a large metal cage or similar that locks on your porch if piracy is a problem in your area. This seems as good an idea as that Amazon one floated a few years back where random Amazon employees have access to the inside of your house to deliver packages.
Seems pretty simple. If they have your address, they have your code. You’d put it on the second line of your address when you order it online.
For the 20% of boxes that cant fit: those are probably going to be too bulky or too heavy for the porch pirate.
But, how interested are you in letting the delivery man (who can retain the codes) full access to your garage (or your house!) I wonder if the codes are “one-time” and expire after they are used. These guys are trying to improve on building a locker on your porch, but they might be introducing new problems.
Our mailbox is at the end of a private road with a bunch of other boxes. One time our mail was stolen including a netflix dvd some of those credit card courtesy checks (which were cashed at the local casino for a couple grand) so we got a nice locking mailbox. After a couple years someone stole the locking mailbox. The replacement, of a different style it looks more like a regular mailbox, has been broken into a couple times though nothing was in it at the time to be stolen. The lock isn’t very strong and the door was pried open with probably a crowbar. I could bend the part that hold it closed back into place by hand. Thankfully packages come to the house which is relatively safe from roaming thieves.
We had a bizarre situation in town a few years ago where the chief of police and his wife, a city prosecutor, tried to frame their uncle for stealing their mailbox. It turned out to be the tip of a big conspiracy involving some of the city’s most powerful people, including federal grand juries and FBI raids on city offices.
Quite a brouhaha for a small backwater like my town.
Not even that long ago. In the mid-2000s, before the real take-off of online shopping, getting packages at home was a huge hassle. Every day I’d come home and find a new UPS post-it stuck to the door saying they tried to deliver and would try again or I could drive to the ass-end of town and stand in a giant line to get it myself. Or sometimes the little box was checked that said “we tried three times, now you have one day to come get it or we’re sending it back”. Sometimes they would inexplicably stick the note on your door saying they tried, without ringing the doorbell. I’d be home all day, then go outside for some air and find the note on the door, followed by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. This mechanism was not some packages, it was all packages. All of this was the experience of everyone I ever knew or talked to about the subject.
I basically never ordered online or by mail at the time because of this problem. It was a huge hassle. Everyone seems to have blocked the entire late 20th/early 21st century state of the UPS/FedEx residential delivery system from their memories.
Then relatively quickly, that changed. Suddenly they were just leaving stuff on the porch by default more and more. Then there was a little bliss period where everything was being left and porch pirates had not yet figured out the opportunity.
How quickly we forget how things used to be. Occasional porch piracy is annoying, but IMHO a small price to pay for the massive increase in convenience of not having to deal with those dreaded UPS post-its on the door.
And then fill the used Amazon boxes with poop and just enough explosives to propell it around inside the thief’s getaway car, and put it out on the porch, just far enough out for the thief not to notice that door.
(Somebody actually did this, but it looks like the video of it is no longer on YouTube.)
Remember to remove the address label that has your name and the code to this thing printed on it first, though.
If it made it to your doorstep intact, that final drop is unlikely to do any additional damage. It went through far worse just getting there.
This, exactly.
I can’t get any parcel carrier to reliably leave packages on my porch. 50% of the time they will drop packages (of any size, down to padded envelopes) in front of my garage door.
I understand the why- there are four steps leading up to my porch/front door, it’s “easier” to leave at the garage door.
I have delivery instructions on everything informing them to leave it on the front porch only. I have a sign on my garage door informing drivers not to leave packages in front of the door. To no avail.
I’ve lost track of how many packages I’ve run over late at night backing in to the garage, or pulling out of the garage because I can’t see it over the hood.
That’s a fair point.
This. When our regular postal carrier is on vacation the fill-in carriers will not open our screen door to put the mail through the door slot. They leave our mail on the bistro table on our porch or on the door mat.
Our house is currently being prepped for repainting and the screen doors have been removed. The carrier from yesterday tossed our mail on the bushes in front of our porch. Grrrr
A quick note about the many comments blaming the delivery people for the state of how packages are left- please don’t! They are underpaid and under enormous pressure to hit inhumane quotas every day. They also don’t get to go home to their families until all allocated deliveries for the day are made, and don’t get overtime. So have a heart when your local person doesn’t place the package in the exact location on your porch that you would prefer or didn’t take 10 minutes to figure out some code for some special lock box or whatever.
I think most complaints here about this type of thing not working are blaming the shipping company not the driver. If the companies wanted to make this a standard, they would. If they thought they could sell it as an upgrade standard, they could do that too.
For instance, UPS will let me pay to automatically or per delivery change the delivery location to a drop off point instead of my house. The shipper doesn’t have to know anything. They could have a fee that would have them do some special action at my house. They choose not to.
On the other side, that doesn’t mean nothing is the drivers fault. The ones that throw a package from 6 feet away, that’s all on the driver. It only take 3 seconds to walk the 6 feet and place it on the ground.
The two scenarios are not the same.
Until a shipping company decides it’s worthwhile to have some type of delivery process that’s different than “place it near the house, near whatever door is easy”. That’s the service we’ll get.
Your point is taken, but…
Even that, I cut them slack. It’s easy to say that when you have to do it once. Doing it a few hundred times a day, 6 or 7 days a week, maybe you’d feel differently. I believe in cutting maximum slack for everyone who does a shitty job for low pay that is also now, thanks to Covidiots, life threatening.
For the record, that’s a federal offense. I’m sure you already knew that!
I know. Sigh. Luckily we’re working from home and we discovered it within the hour.
Part of the issue is that USPS has gutted their carrier work force. I remember when they had unassigned carriers to fill in for sick or vacationing carriers. Now it appears that they split up a absent carrier’s route and tack it on to existing carriers’ routes. More work for them for the same pay. Mail delivery after 9:30 p.m. is not unheard of for our home. It’s difficult for us to get really upset with them.
You really want to stay home for days to accept some small delivery? Or go to a post office or similar at office hours to pick that up?
In the era of online shopping and meal-box deliveries many people average one or more packages a day. The old conventions don’t always scale, even for folks who are on good terms with their neighbors.
