Would delivery drivers really use it, or just throw the package down anyway? I have a little sign on my porch to put packages in a large bin out-of-view, but only once did I actually find a package in there.

Package theft is so rare that when it does happen, the neighborhood bitch blogs and nextdoor fly into a tizzy every time one happens.

It's crazy how little crime we have to worry about now. Remember when you had to make sure you had a locking gas cap? Remember when getting your car stereo stolen was a thing? Now we ship billions of dollars worth of goods and leave them sitting out for the whole world to take and hardly any of them get taken.

It's one of the reasons people who think we need more cops, or more brutal cops, are as batshit insane and stupid as Trump thinking we need 8,000 nuclear weapons. Or any fucker who thinks they need a semi-automatic rifle and a god damn silencer too.

Anyway, if people hardly ever help themselves to all the stuff I order while it sits around outside, I seriously doubt any driver is going to take my shit either. So yes, but there's no need.

Amazon just wants it all - they don't want to pay to rent and guard storefronts (so they don't have to deal with shoplifting loss), but now they don't want to accept the cost of delivery loss. Sorry, dudes, there is a limit! (at least, until you get everyone slowly used to crossing that limit, which will probably happen in about five years.)

@2: It's not as rare as you think it is.

@2: Someone has always lived insulated from high crime areas, I see.

Package theft is exceeding common in the Seattle. So common, that Amazon, UPS and FedEx have developed an elaborate infrastructure to try and deal with it. In some neighborhoods, like Wallingford and Ballard, package theft is virtually assured and there is a whole genre of films from security cameras showing the perps coming in right after delivery and grabbing the packages. Now, if you have a functioning police force, you could catch these thieves. A few have been caught. The goods are usually resold on Craigslist.

Stop lying, you fucking fucks.

I'm not even going to call you stupid or ignorant. You're just fucking lying and you fucking know it.

In 2003 in Seattle there were 50 larceny-thefts per 1,000 people. In 2015 there were only 38 per 1,000 people. In the same period ecommerce deliveries exploded, by a factor of at least 5. Probably more like a factor of 10 or 20 for the affluent neighborhoods that you're whining about.

Ignorant assholes. You think because a thing happened to you it's a trend. If it didn't happen to you, it never happens. Chances are the reason one of your packages went missing is you wrote your own fucking address wrong. Dumbfucks.

Maybe you've noticed I have zero patience left for this kind of lying online. Stop. Fucking. Lying.

And if you're going to come back by flat out MAKING SHIT UP with a bunch of crap about how nobody REPORTS theft now like they did 15 years ago, fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you. Don't lie. Don't make shit up. If you don't fucking know what you're talking about, shut the fuck up. Fuckers.

Crime is down nationwide. You know that. Ecommerce has exploded nationwide. You know that.

The sales of eBay, Amazon, and hundreds of other ecommerce companies have exploded. Brick and mortar stores have taken a beating, and have been driven completely out of business in many cases.

If package theft were anything but a rounding error, none of this could have happened. Brick and mortar would have had too much of an economic advantage. If people were losing a meaningful amount of their purchases to theft, they couldn't afford to keep buying. Insurance rates would be too high. There's just no way to make the facts add up in a way that gives any credence to the notion that package theft is significant.

It's true that there is a *perception* of a big threat from porch theft among a small segment of consumers. This is what has led to the growth of security theater to make a big show of protecting their shit. Online sales grew to a billions of dollars industry with no real effort made to stop porch theft, other than the occasional use of insurance. Now some companies have gotten around to drawing in the higher-hanging fruit in the market, and enticing reluctant consumers to spend more.

So they make a big show of preventing package theft to assuage the fear. Theater for the frightened.

Stop making shit up. Stop lying.

I had 30 years in as a UPS guy in Seattle and suburbs and my experience was that package theft is real but rare. A majority of the time when a package was reported as being shown as delivered but not received by the customer there was some other explanation. It was delivered to the wrong house and the people were just too preoccupied with their own lives to take it to where it was supposed to go or call UPS to come get it, or the teenage son came home from school and picked it up from the porch and threw it in a back bedroom or any one of a million different scenarios other than theft off of the porch. As often as not when I would go out on a 'tracer' it was some variant of "I got the charger but not the cord and what good is it without the cord?" ie a mixup between seller & customer. On the very few occasions where I went out on a high-value tracer where there was not an explanation I strongly scented scam. And frankly I never could see any economic sense behind stalking delivery drivers and stealing packages- 9 times out of 10 they are not only not valuable items but just useless consumer crap ordered by people with terrible taste to begin with. Or they are materials for people with home hobbies that have only a very tiny potential market- specialty drill bits or weaver's supplies or home-brew tubing, that sort of thing. If you think you are going to hoover up rolex watches and sony cameras, hah! Good luck with that. Package thieves have to be not only among the most desperate but the most stupid of criminals, especially nowadays with cameras everywhere. A lot of risk for pretty damn meager reward.

Back when ice delivery came to every house, a lot of people had little half-doors that opened to a compartment or ice chest in the pantry. They were only large enough to shove ice through, so that icemen couldn't enter the home. Where once we designed for ice, surely some architects are already designing for daily parcels, with oversized mailboxes, lockboxes or other features. It's just a matter of giving access to more than just the USPS.

@7: It's fine that you have lived the life you have, but don't assume that your perceptions of the world are accurate based solely on that sheltered life. There is a whole world outside wealthy, white Seattle.

Oh, and no one cares about how much "patience" you have before you throw a tantrum. No one is threatened by a random internet voice, tough guy.

@12

Hot air. Go fuck yourself with your bullshit.

1. You have no data. You're fucking guessing. I have data.
2. You have no deep, broad experience, as the UPS driver above does. He has experience, you don't.

So shut up. Either cite some facts and present them, or cite a personal experience that means something. Not that one time your ebay order never showed up and you decided to blame "tweakers" instead of a million other obvious reasons why packages don't arrive.

It's irrelevant whether I have a "sheltered life" (I have no idea why you pulled that out of your ass, but it's irrelevant) or whether I am a "tough guy" (again, I have no idea...). Have you looked at the crime data? Have you been a UPS driver for 30 years?

So fuck off. This package theft hysteria is bullshit, and it's mostly used by nextdoor assholes to try to abuse people living in cars or on the street. People who ought to know better and have no excuse for not being well informed of these widely published facts.

Most porch pirate thefts aren't reported to police. They are resolved by the shipper/seller. In the first 1200 eBay sales we had there were 7 reports from my customers of packages left at doors and not accounted for. Now I only ship non First Class package shipments requiring a direct adult signature. All those missing packages were paid by the insurance on the shipping (across FedEx Ground/Home and UPS) and only one looked to be fishy. That was the only one that didn't reqest another item or didn't reorder after refund. They went dark. We've done another couple thousand shipments since and no reports of theft but we've had several complain about shipping requiring a signature.

Contrast that to where we live now in Vegas I've had 3 missing in the last couple of years. They absolutely have arrested people targeting the same areas for package theft. In Vegas, it's a thing.
My experience as a recipient has been a lot different than as a shipper.

@13 if you have some stats instead of ranting post them. The only stats I could find were from people with an interest in selling something to prevent the thefts.

https://www.shorr.com/packaging-news/201…

https://august.com/wp-content/uploads/20…

"Most porch pirate thefts aren't reported to police."

You have no idea whether or not that's true or not. I hear this "not reported to police" excuse a lot whenever someone wants to deny the historically low crime rate that became the new normal since about 2005. It's transparently bullshit.

Your personal anecdotal rate -- which we have no idea is typical or not -- of 7 out of 1200 is 0.6%. Sales lost to shoplifting in brick and mortar stores is more like 1.4%. That's two and a half times greater. So the costs passed on to consumers -- replacement merchandise, insurance, security precautions -- are well under half, more like 2/5 of what we're used to in normal commerce. Package theft exists (though I would still bet most "thefts" are misrouted and lost packages), but it is a very small problem. Hence the growth and success of online sales. Hence people who have shopped online at Amazon or eBay or whatever have returned to shop there again and again and again to the tune of trillions of dollars. Because it is reliable and safe.

Or take this other (probably questionable) statistic: 11 million homeowners experienced package theft in a year. Wow! That's a lot. But... thats 11 million out of how many packages?

USPS: 4.5 billion packages per year
FedEx & UPS: 6.5 billion

11 million divided by 11 billion is 0.1%. A TENTH of a percent.

The UPS driver above makes a very clear point, as well: most packages on most porches don't contain anything you could quickly turn into cash or drugs. They contain bland consumer goods that no pawn shop or fence or drug dealer wants to give you anything for. The payoff is too small to make it worth it. The 0.1% to 0.5% numbers here bear that out.

We don't need to dig that deep into this because the rough numbers show that any loss rate, any way you calculate it is ridiculously small. What did I call it? A rounding error. That's what it is.

It's a free country. If you want all your packages sent to Amazon Locker or whatever that's cool with me.

My problem is when paranoid cranks on nextdoor.com form a mob and demand a police crackdown on homeless people, minorities and anyone who looks funny because they're whipped into a frenzy over this phony package theft crime wave. It's a lie used by comfortable middle class whites to make life shitty for vulnerable people.

I've had a number of things stolen off my porch. Even the things in my mailbox (which locks) get stolen. After having 7 boxes stolen from my porch (which has a ledge that could prevent items from being seen IF DELIVERY PEOPLE HAD BRAINS), I now have everything shipped to work. Which is annoying to carry home on the bus, but then at least I have it.

And, no, I would not give people access to my house. Now, to a lockbox on my porch? Yes....

@15, you're right - relatively uncommon things should simply not be worried about. After all, how many people get run over in crosswalks, right? Hardly anybody? Sure, 20% of women will get raped sometime in their life, but what about the 80% who just don't give a shit, like you don't give a shit about anything that doesn't happen to you personally?

Fuck you, you selfish solipsistic asswipe.

Every day. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY I find MULTIPLE ripped-apart boxes strewn around my neighborhood when I walk the dog. Sure, any given person only gets hit a couple of times a year, probably. But don't act like we shouldn't be pissed off about it. Every morning, EVERY MORNING, when I leave for work, the mailboxes across the street are hanging open, because the mail thieves have been by to steal our mail.

And I'll add that police won't even take a report if you call them about package theft. They say, go online and file a report. Gee, I'm sure everybody does that. Oh, wait -- I'm sure hardly anybody does that. Your figures are bullshit, you're pulling stuff out of your ass CONSTANTLY, and once again, for clarity, fuck you. Asshole.