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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, in Seattle - Amazon's home city - package theft is seen as a significant problem. So, I would imagine that deterring package theft is a real concern and a real quality of life issue for many Amazon ICs.

I would argue a key root solution here is to for police to prioritize addressing property crime, rather than for private citizens to attempt to address the civic policing concerns on their own - which is what these cameras are doing, at their core.

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Or, don’t “deliver” a package by just leaving it out in the open on the person’s property somewhere. It’s always seemed bizarre to me that this counts as delivery in the USA. We should normalize bigger and more secure mailboxes or require an actual person to be available to receive a package.

Indeed, in Europe it is normal that people be home to receive the package. There are alternatives, but leaving it in front of the door is not one of them.

What about people without doormen or stay-at-home spouses? If you're single and go to work daily, having to be home is the biggest headache pre-pandemic.

So, bigger, more secure mailboxes, then.

What we do in Japan. They don't deliver, you call the delivery service to reorganise delivery at a convenient time for you

In order to avoid a 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 chance of a package being stolen, I don't want to have to have an extra interaction for every delivery.

Leave it on the porch; if one gets stolen every few years, that's still wildly more convenient than rescheduling most deliveries.

I had 2700 dollars of computer equipment stolen from my porch (behind a gate). I used the camera footage to get the police to write a report that NewEgg needed to refund me.

Depends on your neighborhood. Some neighborhoods have a 1 in 2 chance. The footage showed that the culprit tailed the USPS delivery person on foot and waited about 15 minutes.

At my old job, I used to get stuff delivered to my office. It was a big office building and we had a logistics department with a loading bay out the back. A lot of other people at my office used to do the same thing. Until work announced that they were getting sick of handling personal deliveries, and from now on only work-related deliveries would be allowed. (I think they didn't mind in the beginning handling the occasional personal delivery, but then it escalated in volume to the point that they had to put a stop to it.)

Nowadays (even pre-pandemic) I work from home full-time so there is usually someone here. But actually I used to get stuff delivered to the office even when my wife was at home full-time. There is always the chance she would go out, whereas there was someone down in logistics 8am-6pm.

Are there any Amazon lockers in your area? I usually drop by the University which has a staffed Amazon store since it's a distribution center and packages get there a day early usually. There's a series of lockers at a near by 7-11.

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