Off topic: two solutions to home delivery theft
Off topic: two solutions to home delivery theft
By now we all know that theft of packages delivered to people’s home doorstep is a big problem. Here are pictures of two solutions:1. Massive 1984-style and easily hackable home monitoring. Or even worse, the ability of the delivery person to open the homeonwer’s garage to leave the package inside.
2. A large 1950’s style milkbox:
For those of you who may not know what I am talking about, the milkbox was built into the side wall of a garage and had doors that could be opened and locked from the inside on each side.
The homeowner unlocked the outside door. When the milk was delivered and the milkman closed the outside door, it would lock from the inside. When the homeowner wanted to retrieve the milk, they opened the inside door.
Make the box wider to accommodate larger sized packages. Problem solved.
Stealing milk and empty milk bottles used to be a real problem, especially back when bottles were expensive. We forget that deliveries used to be a lot more common before the rise of the suburbs. It wasn’t just milk. There were bread, ice, soda, grocery and other deliveries. Housewives did not lug heavy groceries. Delivery boys did.
@ Kaleberg,
“Housewives did not lug heavy groceries.”
I have Walmart hire people to deliver 35# pails of kitty litter to my door for the same price as trekking to the store and lugging it home. Not a housewife, but a lazy old man.
There is a 3rd solution. Side-entry. You cannot see our front door nor the stoop from the street.
There is a 4th solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR-A1
Won’t work in rural areas, but in Germany they have post delivery box centers with electronically opened boxes. You register with the postage service provider or when you receive a link informing you the delivery is coming you can then provide a location and you get an SMS or email informing you where the package is. You can then use a pin to open the box and retrieve your package. There is one of these 300m from our house.
Reason,
The same thing is in use at Home Depot.
Reason: Amazon does something similar. You can sign up to have your package delivered to a local convenience or grocery store. You get an email with a code when it is delivered. It’s really a win/win/win situation. Your package doesn’t get stolen by porch pirates, It is cheaper to deliver a bunch of packages to one address, and the store gets some more people in there. (and whatever payment Amazon gives them for use of the square footage.
Listening to an NPR article last week talking about the issue online shopping with delivery is creating the noted that 90,000 packages are stolen daily in NYC.
The problem with delivery to Amazon Hub (local store) is there are limits to the size and weight of packages. And, it somewhat negates the convenience of one-day and home delivery if you have to schlep out to a local store anyway.
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Get into an argument with a libertarian and eventually they will tell you they should have the right to make as much as noise as they want, or pollute as much as they want, and they shouldn’t be required to mitigate the damage they cause, even when it extends onto someone else’s property.
Here in California we’ve moved to a similar place. I don’t quite follow the argument, but something about disparate impact means that for practical purposes, activists have (apparently successfully) made the point that porch pirates and people who break into vehicles should be immune from prosecution. Don’t want your car broken into? Figure out how to prevent it yourself. Ironic to see the lefty Democratic legislature adopting libertarian positions.
Hey Mike:
Such a bargain, $81,000/year to house a person in a California prison for stealing off a porch or for breaking a car window both of which are done to feed a drug problem. A year or so there and they will come out as pros and move on to better things . . .
Solve the problem.
I don’t know what the solution is. Free heroine, food and housing? Because I think we can all agree that the folks who are on and want to stay on heroine shouldn’t be driving school buses or designing re-entry vehicles. Whatever jobs they end up with, to get them and keep them they will need to outcompete anyone in the world who wants to do those jobs since we have all but open borders for low-wage labor in California, so the likelihood that the jobs they have won’t pay for heroine, food and housing. So the income side of the equation is going to be very hard to square under current circumstances.
As to the spending side… 81K per prisoner is easy to total up since its all in one place. Its a little harder to total up distributed costs, like all the broken car windows (apparently it isn’t burglary any more if you cannot prove the car door was locked!), all the stolen packages, and all the added expenses of security cameras and other devices? Some kids found a syringe and a needle in the playground a few blocks from here, so you can throw on the added costs parents now go through to ensure that their kids don’t hang out at the playground.