
90k Packages Disappear Daily in NYC - koolba
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/online-shopping-package-theft.html
======
Semaphor
Wait, are packages just left outside? And the recipient or sender are at
fault? That seems pretty strange.

Here (Germany) if you aren’t home (and haven’t given special instructions
which could include leaving the package outside) it’s either given to a
neighbor, a package-holding place or goes to the post office for you to get.

~~~
Finnucane
Here in the US, private services like UPS and FedEx can't deliver to the post
office. You can ask for a package to be delivered with signature required, but
what that means is that if you aren't home it will be held at a distribution
center for you to go pick up.

Otherwise, yes, packages will just be left wherever in front of your door.

~~~
Alex3917
FedEx has partnered with lots of pharmacies and bodegas around the city who
can ostensibly receive your packages. The problem is that these locations are
allowed to decide that they just don't want to deal with any given package
even if it's within the allowed size and weight requirements, and/or FedEx is
allowed to decide they aren't going to bother actually delivering it and
instead of just routing it to another nearby location or holding it at the
distribution center, FedEx will instead just send it back to the sender. It's
basically a scam that FedEx is running to make senders pay multiple times for
shipping the same thing across the country.

I recently had to stake out a Walgreens and wait for the driver to show up to
actually get a package before it was returned to the sender.

~~~
t34543
Walgreens did this to me, too. My package legally contained alcohol, with the
right label, and they refused to accept it.

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css
According to [0], there are 1.5m deliveries per day, so the 90k number here
gives us a 6% failure rate. They cite 15% in the article [1], which is insane.
I guess this goes to the security facade most buildings have, where saying
"UPS" at the buzzer gets you near-unlimited access.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
deliv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
delivery.html)

[1] (pdf)
[https://depts.washington.edu/sctlctr/sites/default/files/SCT...](https://depts.washington.edu/sctlctr/sites/default/files/SCTL_Muni_Tower_Test_Report_V4.pdf)

~~~
Finnucane
If it's 6% in NY, and averaging 15% elsewhere, there must be places where
getting a package delivered is pretty high risk.

~~~
arkades
Lived near Yale for a little while. It is difficult to believe the theft rate
in my area was <80%. We firmly gave up on deliveries to the home, and had to
warn friends and relatives not to send us anything. Nearly everything got
grabbed. It was beyond ridiculous.

I hear that area has improved now, but certainly back then...

------
shackenberg
Walking through Manhattan this Summer, I once saw several delivery people
sorting dozens of Amazon packages directly on the sidewalk. I could not
believe my eyes.

~~~
CydeWeys
This is an every day sight here, especially during the holiday season. It's
not uncommon to see entire carts stacked full of packages left unattended on
the sidewalk as the employee is delivering packages inside a building.

~~~
fru2013
Another NYTimes article on this phenomenon

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
deliv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
delivery.html)

------
TheAdamist
Amazon lockers aren't even a perfect fix, received an opened and empty package
the other day. Stolen by the driver or someone hacked the lockers.

~~~
drdeadringer
How easily are Amazon Lockers hacked? I've not heard about that before.

~~~
TheAdamist
No idea, the most plausible explanation is that the driver stole the item and
left the empty envelope. Although what they thought they could do with
replacement foam pads for a particular set of headphones I don't know.

But I'm sure it's possible to lockpick the door or do something else to the
locker, as it was an outside 24/7 one. fairly unlikely though.

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smileysteve
I find it alarming that our policing (in)abilities are hurting the
institutions that we trust, that have traditionally made us different from the
less developed world (such as mailing something in Brazil)

~~~
magduf
Have you looked at America's infrastructure lately? It's really no better than
the "less developed world".

~~~
leggomylibro
Oh, I dunno. Major freeways are generally well-paved and easy to drive on at
70-80mph, pipes reliably deliver water which is usually safe to drink in most
areas, blackouts/brownouts are very uncommon outside of extreme weather
events, and there's been a lot of visible investment in stuff like solar/wind
power recently. We even have reasonably-maintained primitive road networks
running through most of the nation's forests and wilderness areas.

Sure there are some dim spots, like the huge number of bridges that badly need
renovation and the frequent need to replace old lead pipes, but it's fairly
uncommon to notice the infrastructure in most states. And that's pretty high
praise for infrastructure.

IMO there are plenty of good arguments that our social institutions are in a
worse state than most other nations, but our physical infrastructure doesn't
seem to be going to ruin just yet.

~~~
magduf
Obviously you've never driven on the roads in the nation's capital.

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insickness
Like a lot of apartment buildings in NYC, in my building, packages are left in
the hallway instead the key-pad locked front door. There were some problems in
the past with packages getting stolen, but not recently. However, there are a
few packages that have been siting there for a few months that are at the
wrong address. None of the carriers seem to give a shit to pick them up, even
when people mark that they are at the wrong address.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Yeah I had more packages stolen when I lived in Cupertino than NYC.

But I've had quite a few packages delivered to the wrong address and our lobby
constantly has wrong deliveries of both USPS mail and packages. Usually the
Ave/Street are mixed up or off-by-one or a digit in the street number is
different from ours.

We once had a huge box of pet food from China mostly blocking our main egress
for a week until we found the person it was supposed to go to.

It's a nuisance that the city should fix.

~~~
magduf
>Usually the Ave/Street are mixed up

There should be a federal law against this kind of stupidity. It's
unbelievable that many towns and cities actually thought it'd be a good idea
to have two different streets with the exact same name, but one is an "Avenue"
and one is a "street". I have a relative who lives on a "Second Ave" and has
had all kinds of problems with mail because there's another address in that
same small town with the same house number, but on "Second Street", and the
person there is not cooperative when mis-addressed mail goes there.

~~~
rtkwe
Ok how do you solve the problem of annexing where two towns might have both
been maintaining unique street names within their own systems but have overlap
when they merge. Towns grow like that all the time.

~~~
magduf
Solution 1: keep the town names separate (this means separate post offices and
zip codes). Solution 2: change the street names.

------
treyfitty
I have used FedEx for my business only 5 times this year in NYC to have
important packages delivered (our vendors weren't flexible in these
instances). 3 out of those 5 times, the driver slapped a "sorry we missed you
sticker" and just left, or they delivered it to the wrong address (the next
street over). The drivers are pretty careless and simply don't care enough. I
even get deliveries that are clearly not the right address, yet they end up on
my building doorstep. FedEx is simply frustrating to deal with.

Their "investigations" will reveal one story, but my security camera reveals
another, and even management doesn't care that my building's deliveries are
never made because the drivers just slap the sticker and move on.

~~~
stronglikedan
The best part is that, at least in my FedEx delivery area, the drivers "own"
the route. So, if you file a complaint about them, they typically just make
your experience more frustrating out of spite.

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ConcernedCoder
So far this week I've had 2 packages left right in front of my front door (
actually blocking it ) with full visibility from the street with no knock or
doorbell ring ( I work from home and my office is right next to the front door
). One package left right in front of my front door ( actually blocking it )
with a light knock on the door. Two packages delivered to my neighbors house 2
doors down the street ( thanks USPS )... it's no wonder packages disappear
daily, I think either the delivery drivers are co-conspiritors with the actual
package thieves, or these services are hiring/using people actually unfit to
do the job... I mean in the USPS case, both packages were clearly marked with
my address... it's a number, how do you get that wrong?

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hateful
I live in the suburbs and have long thought about building a small package
shed in the front of my house. I use Amazon for most of my packages and was
thinking about getting Amazon's smart lock and putting it on this shed.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
There have been a couple startups that have attempted something similar with
large cooler sized boxes and shared keycodes.

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bob_theslob646
>Around the country, more than 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing
every day — adding up to more than $25 million in lost goods and services,
according to an analysis for The Times by José Holguín-Veras, an engineering
professor and director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of
Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems.

1) the value of goods seems off. How can the average package only be 15 bucks?
( I wonder if they are keeping the costs down to deter people from stealing 2)
What the heck is "Sustainable Urban Freight Systems?"

>Gabriel Cepeda, 23, came up with the idea for a start-up company built around
collecting packages, called Pickups Technologies, after his own Amazon order
of computer hard drives was stolen last year outside of his parents’ home in
New Jersey. He spent hours on the phone trying to get his order replaced. “It
was bad enough to motivate me to brainstorm,” he said.Now Mr. Cepeda’s company
connects online shoppers with a network of about 30 residents in the Brooklyn
neighborhood of Williamsburg who will accept packages at their homes at all
hours, for fees ranging from $4.99 for a single delivery, to $9.99 for a
monthly service. The company plans to expand to more neighborhoods.

Decent idea, but the liability has to be insane. I think he would need to grow
rather large in order to cover insurance costs if God forbid a few of these
people decided to sue if something valuable were damaged/stolen.

It literally sounds like finding people who are not working ( retired,
elderly, stay at home, disabled, etc, ) who are home at x time per day. Sounds
like a crazy optimization problem.

>In New York, the police do not break out stolen packages into a separate
category. Instead, these cases generally fall under grand larceny if an item
is valued at more than $1,000, or petit larceny if valued at less.

With all that budget, why cannot they keep statistics on package theft? Seems
like the city is behind the times.

~~~
TomVDB
I checked my Amazon orders for the past two months: ~60% of the packages are
$10 or less. However, there are a bunch of them that are $50+, and a few
expensive packages can compensate for a large number of smaller ones.

If my buying pattern is typical for your average Prime user, $15 per package
isn't completely outrageous.

------
MrBuddyCasino
Does NYC not have parcel shops?

~~~
msheng
We do, but probably not with 90k capacity across the city

~~~
nateferrero
The capacity of parcel shops seems to be a lot more than 90k based on my
unsubstantiated guesswork; more likely things aren’t bad enough to merit a
change [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
deliv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-
delivery.html) say 1.5M total deliveries per day. This means 6% of packages
are stolen. So 94% of the time, it works, and that’s good enough for most.
What can be done?

~~~
MisterTea
> What can be done?

Explosive decoy packages.

~~~
alistairSH
Just in case you haven't seen it yet...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-
hwuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo)

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mensetmanusman
$10-100M theft per year? Seems obvious to install drop boxes....

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daniel2x
I suppose we figured out where all those npm packages are coming from then...

;)

------
bluedino
I live in a much smaller city (~50k) in the US. The post office will leave
anything, anywhere. Once in a while I need to go downtown to the main post
office to pick stuff up. Takes them forever to find my packages, and there's
always a big line. Terrible.

UPS/FedEx packages that need a signature are a pain, you can't do anything
until they try to deliver at least once. Then you have to drive to the hub
which is either by the airport or the next town over and pick it up, their
hours suck.

FedEx lets you re-route your package to the local Walgreens, which I really
find useful.

~~~
rtkwe
Sign up for MyChoice or the Fedex equivalent, they're free for basic stuff
like this. If you really want to you can prerelease a package but it
essentially indemnifies the company from any delivery problem unless you have
proof it never made it to your door step. You can also redirect them to a
store or partner location before they attempt delivery at all through UPS's
service and I think Fedex has a similar option.

------
gwern
How do they handle this in East Asian cities, where densities and package
volumes seem like they ought to be just as high?

~~~
et-al
In Taiwan and Japan, they'll leave packages at the convenience store
(konbini). Also, people are more respectful of others in those two countries,
so property crime isn't as high as most American cities anyway.

------
jariel
Well there was this thing called 'BufferBox' in Canada and a similar thing in
the US, essentially semi-private boxes into which mail could be placed with a
temp. combo.

The UW grads that sold it to Google were borderline arrogant about it, boldly
assumptive about how they were going to change how packages were delivered in
Canada. That was 10 years ago and of course nothing has happened.

I suggest there are some fairly simple technological solutions along those
lines (i.e. a series of larger boxes in each building with a temp code) that
could really work, but that the USPS etc. are fundamentally not interested in
doing anything innovative. Private entities just aren't positioned to do this,
as the pervasive nature of 'mail' is something that lends to
socialised/government action.

I really wish UPS/FedEx/Amazon would get together in this because collectively
they have enough power to lobby/influence enough cities to create a critical
mass for this, and they have the incentive and operational capabilities to do
it.

Making boxes available for purchase for homes, having everything standardised
etc. and the legal issues sorted out around it would be so beneficial.

It's one area where we hardly need 'new tech' rather some 'operational
innovation' at scale.

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dwnvoted2hell
This sounds like a massive class action lawsuit waiting to happen. I wonder
who would be hit first, the shippers or the city? Surely they are both at
fault.

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jordache
nyc is such a *hit show

------
jeffrallen
If you can't be bothered to at least shop in your neighborhood stores, could
you at least be bothered to sign for your packages at the post? It's just the
cost of living in civilised society: either you interact with the store clerk
or the postman. Choose.

~~~
magduf
In a truly civilized society, people don't generally steal things from each
other.

If theft is a big problem in your society, then it isn't really that
civilized.

~~~
Shivetya
which is a sad statement on the what the US has become. Just look at the
looting that comes during disasters here.

This is a cultural issue that needs correction starting in schools where it
gets repeated day and day out to respect others and the property of others.
Then top this off with not accepting politicians who incite negative behavior
by telling people their situation was caused by others whose gains were
unfairly acquired. It is far easier for people to reason theft if someone in
authority gives them that scenario, that people who have more than them
probably did it unfairly and it is not just that they lack the same.

~~~
nkrisc
> Then top this off with not accepting politicians who incite negative
> behavior by telling people their situation was caused by others whose gains
> were unfairly acquired.

Maybe you meant it exactly this way, but I can't tell if you were referring to
Democrats or Republicans, because both have the same message about different
groups.

