Are Package Thieves Getting Rich off of You?
So, I get a call from my friend Jewell on a Friday late-afternoon, and she’s more than a little bent. As soon as I say hello, she dives into a frustrated rant about her packages being stolen, again. “Right from in front of my [expletive] door.” Are you sure? I ask... “Boo, the concierge confirmed they delivered it to my door this morning and some [expletive] jacked my [expletive] before I got home,” she goes on to say. “Ty, I swear this building..., if I find out who stole my packages, I swear…” like I said, she was hot.
My friend lives in an 84-unit condo building in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, but this is not an issue limited just to her building, nor to Washington, DC. Package theft is real, and is a serious problem throughout the United States, especially for condo and multifamily communities in major metropolitan cities. And while these communities have to deal with this threat from the outside, unless there are cameras in place to help mitigate this, it’s uncertain whether the threat is always from outside of the community… This was the main reason my friend was so vexed.
As Amazon.com and a host of other online and brick and mortar retailers see their orders increase, “Porch Pirates” (package thieves) have made themselves the beneficiaries of these gifts, at the paying customer’s expense…your expense. In an extensive study conducted by shorr|packging corp., package theft trends are increasing at a staggering rate in metropolitan cities’ hubs, mailrooms, buildings, and doorsteps across the country.
Among the top 10 cities?
1. San Francisco
2. Seattle
3. Minneapolis
4. Boston
5. Portland, Ore.
6. Washington, D.C.
7. Oakland, Calif.
8. Baltimore
9. Atlanta
10. Sacramento, Calif.
Interestingly, shorr reported that “Also notable is the high concentration of wealth in these cities, which could manifest as more packages to steal (more people ordering and consuming more things) or, from a thief’s perspective, more high-value targets relative to cities with less wealth.”
In their list below shorr provides a list of package theft in cities throughout the United States, and provided, among other info, the following information for its data… “In July 2018, we used Google AdWords to assess the rolling monthly averages for the search term “Amazon package stolen,” in the 50 most populous US cities... We then quantified the prevalence of searches by calculating searches per capita (as well as the inverse of that ratio, persons per search).”
AMAZON PACKAGE THEFT IN MAJOR US CITIES
This research is sobering and goes a long way to help put that missing package(s) in perspective that you ordered but never received. And looking at these stats, that random missing package doesn’t seem so random after all. Fast forward to January 2020, and a CNBC article reports that 1.7 million packages are lost or stolen every day in the U.S., according to researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And this is pre COVID-19!
What does this mean for your package deliveries in today? Well, if your building has a concierge or front desk with staff that receives and stores packages, or BuildingLink to help track packages, or a package locker such as Amazon Hub or Luxerone.com which allows packages to be left securely inside the locker for your retrieval, chances are your risks are lower for package theft. But not so much for those condo communities that don’t have these services.
If this is an issue for your community, now is the time to contact your condo board of directors and inquire what measures they have in place or are putting in place to protect residents’ packages. And if they don’t have or are unable to put any effective measures in place, you might want to seriously consider exploring some personal options of your own to protect your online orders to assure they’re delivered and make it safely into your hands. Especially if you are a frequent online shopper.
Check out these compelling package theft reports here by shorr Packaging Corp.
