Thwarting holiday package thieves
Options for deliveries range from Access Points to P.O. boxes.
Online shopping this holiday season is expected to reach $83 billion, according to industry analysts, with upward of 121 million shoppers who planned to click “buy” on Cyber Monday alone.
That’s a lot of packages that will need delivery, and a lot of potential booty for opportunistic thieves.
“It’s close to the holidays, and thieves are out there, and they’re looking,” said Denver police spokeswoman Raquel Lopez. “It does happen.”
The Denver Police Department doesn’t specifically keep track of how many packages get swiped. It’s just classified as theft, Lopez said, not by the item taken.
But a recent study, conducted by Denver-based insurance shopping clearinghouse InsuranceQuotes.com, said as many as 23 million Americans have been victims of package theft.
A scan of the Nextdoor social network throughout the Denver area tells the all-too-familiar tale: A package, waiting for its recipient to come home, is snatched off the front stoop, often in broad daylight and sometimes in clear view of security cameras.
“It’s an easy target,” said Josh Greer, who created an evening-only delivery service in Denver this year in response to a problem one of his own neighbors experienced. “Usually there’s something of value in there, and there’s nobody watching over it.”
But consumers have plenty of options for protecting their holiday bounty, experts said, from requiring a signature on all deliveries to having their packages sent elsewhere for safekeeping.
“There’s a lot of things that people can consider to feel more comfortable,” said Pamela Durkee, a U.S. postal inspector and spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Denver.
UPS Access Point
UPS will deliver 630 million packages nationwide between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, including 36 million on Dec. 22 alone, according to the company.
This year, it is offering a new option to ensure their safe receipt. UPS Access Point rolled out earlier this year in Denver, one of 100 cities nationwide to get the program.
If a customer isn’t home on the first delivery attempt and lacks a secure place to leave the package, the UPS driver will leave a slip and deliver the item to the closest neighborhood business designated as an Access Point, said UPS spokeswoman Natalie GodwinNorrington.
From there, customers just bring the slip and a photo ID to pick up the package at their convenience from the Access Point. All the locations have evening and weekend hours.
So far, there are 43 Access Points in Denver, Boulder, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Federal Heights, Glendale and Lakewood — coffee shops, hardware stores, dry cleaners and more — in addition to standard UPS stores.
Customers who sign up for a free UPS My Choice account can also have their packages automatically routed to their closest Access Point or provide directions to where they want a package left, whether that’s on the back porch or with a neighbor.
“A lot of people are at work during the day when our drivers are out delivering,” Godwin-Norrington said. “We want to make it convenient, and we want to make sure the packages are in a safe location, especially now with the busy holiday season.”
St. Kilian’s Cheese Shop, at West 32nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard in Denver’s West Highland neighborhood, became an Access Point a couple of weeks ago, after frequent Nextdoor posts highlighted a problem with stolen packages in the area, owner Jon Marsh said.
“We thought, it’s a tightknit neighborhood, and this is something we can do for the neighbors,” Marsh said. “It’s not a huge burden on us, and maybe, we get a couple of new customers out of it, too.”
All packages waiting for pickup are stored in the shop’s basement. Already they have regulars who have all of their UPS deliveries sent straight to the shop.
“The best part for us, it’s not generating huge sales or anything, but we get a lot of people who are happy and appreciative of the service,” Marsh said.
Delivery services
Greer, creator of Sunset Deliveries in Denver, said package theft is something he has worried about himself.
“I would get notifications from UPS that my package was delivered at 2 p.m., and I was nervous the whole drive home,” he said.
Inspired by a similar service in San Francisco, Chicago and New York, Sunset Deliveries functions through a smartphone app.
When shopping online, customers enter Sunset’s delivery address instead of their own. When the package arrives at Sunset’s secure facility, an e-mail goes out asking the customer to schedule a time to have the package delivered — between 6 and 11 p.m., seven days a week — when he or she will be at home to sign for it. The cost is $5 per delivery.
“Twenty-three million Americans have had packages stolen — that’s significant,” Greer said. “It affects a lot of people. Everyone knows somebody.”
Recommendations
The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to deliver 600 million packages nationwide over the holidays, recommends asking a friend or neighbor to pick up your mail if you know a package is coming that day; shipping packages to your place of employment, if possible; using services that require a signature on delivery; or even renting a P.O. box.
“We do know it occurs. Thefts do occur,” Durkee said. “They are isolated incidents, but unfortunately they do happen.”
Any mail theft should be reported to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and to local police, she said. Complaints can be filed online at postalinspectors.uspis.gov.
“The information is valuable to us,” Durkee said. “If we see an increase in an isolated area, we’ll know perhaps thieves are targeting an area. It’s good for us to know, and it’s an issue we’d bring up with our local postal employees and offices.”