It can be a lot of hassle to pick up packages depending on where the courier can have you pick it up. I had to pick up a package at the courier facility this morning; fortunately it’s on the way to my office. I have however had to walk all over downtown to pick up packages that couldn’t be delivered and occasionally drive out to the burbs.
My uncle sent me a bunch of stuff from my late grandmother without telling me that he sent it. It arrived while I was on vacation. I had to drive from downtown Toronto to Concord Ontario, which is probably an hour drive depending on time of day and traffic, in order to pick it up.
There’s no need to provide security for incoming packages, because if something’s stolen, Amazon forces the merchant to replace the item out of pocket.
Of course there are other sellers, but most consumers just push the “A” button that’s preinstalled on their phone when they want something. It’s easy.
I understand that other sellers often hear from customers who claim that their shipment was stolen and expect a replacement for free. They expect free shipping, too.
You can get that service here as well, but the default is normally to leave it. Packages get stolen frequently enough that the news stations can always find stolen package stories to run on slow news days, and next-door is full of reports about porch pirates. However I’ll note I live in a “not good” neighborhood (with lots of “nearby” (under 2 miles away) reports of porch pirates), in the last two years I have had the US Mail stolen once, and Amazon & other packages stolen zero times. I’ve had Amazon miss-deliver packages at least a dozen times though, FexEd lost a $300 laser tube, OnTrac actually delivered a package to the wrong city (which didn’t even have a street with a matching name), and many other misshaps.
So maybe my house looks magically more menacing to would be porch pirates, or maybe the fears about porch pirating are overblown.
(I totally believe it is a thing, but statistically it seems more likely that delivery company will break or misdeliever a package then it will be stolen)
…is far too broad a generalisation. Especially, just for starters, as plenty of phones come without Amazon pre-installed and lots of purchases are made via a PC/laptop (especially, I suspect, by older people). Then there’s eBay, and all the other online shopping emporia, and the online stores of many retailers and manufacturers. Of course, I have a UK perspective, where perhaps Amazon is slightly behind the market penetration it has in the US. (?)
Yeah, well I did say I had a UK perspective. That’s a scary graph. But it does exclude eBay purchases. (Because, obviously, they are not a single retailer, merely a channel for online shopping.)
I’m not going to buy a car just to make you happy with my shopping choices. Nor am I going to be that bus rider, taking up two or three seats with all their stuff. For bulky dry goods, delivery is certainly back-saving, if not actually life-saving.
But it might get stolen while waiting on the porch.
What I find annoying is now a lot of the time now I’ll get a photo showing that my package was delivered, presumably absolving the delivery service of any theft that occurs after the drop-off, no matter where they decided to leave the package. And since my porch looks like any number of porches around me… bah.
A million times ^this. [full disclosure: grew up in the Twin Cities.]
@TacoChucks: We don’t get all that many packages, but we live on a busy street, and had a package that was carelessly left on the front porch (instead of the back porch, as instructed) stollen just last week. This is the 5th or sixth package stollen from our front porch over the last 5-6 years (second in as many months). The only reason we haven’t had more things stollen is because I had stuff delivered to work for 3 of the last 5 years. Only switched back to the house upon discovery that “delivery options” are now a thing.
tl;dr: you’re either home most of the time, or you’ve been exceedingly lucky (assuming you live in the US in a semi-urban or higher-density area).
