When You Receive Packages in NYC, Be Prepared That They’ll Get Lost
I never thought I would lose a package, not one delivered by Amazon, with its sophisticated tracking and computational system; and not in an apartment building equipped with a doorman and a weekend security guard. But the weekend after Black Friday proved me wrong.
On Thanksgiving night, I ordered two iPads online for my uncle and had them sent to my apartment in Manhattan. My uncle and his family live in a row house in the Bronx and they always have some issues with receiving packages when there is no one at home, so he decided that delivering to my place was a safer choice. One iPad was for my 8-year-old cousin, and the other for his grandmother. The 8-year-old couldn’t wait to receive the iPad, and started counting the days. He had been talking about buying a new iPad since mid-August. They were estimated to be delivered three days after the order was placed.
When Amazon notified me that both packages (the two iPads were ordered and shipped separately) arrived on Sunday, I went to the doorman’s office immediately, only to find one of them missing. My building had only received one package for me, even though the tracking information indicated that the missing one was delivered to my address and signed by some “Gutierez.” Scarily enough, no doorman or security guard in my building was named Gutierez.
A rush of anger and fear attacked me. Where is my iPad? How could something valued at $360 vanish without explanation?
Before moving to New York, I lived in a country where package loss or package theft is a rare thing. If I order an iPad on Tmall, China’s biggest online retailer, I’ll have to pay first, the same as buying things anywhere else, but the transaction will be held by Tmall until the iPad is delivered. Within the next few days, I will receive a call from the deliverer, who will tell me that the package is about to be delivered and will check to make sure somebody is at home, or ask about where to leave the package if nobody is there.
Some courier companies assign deliverers to cover the same areas, and they soon become familiar with residents. My parents know deliverers who deliver to my neighborhood very well, and they can even coordinate the delivery service together — when to deliver, whether to hold the package or not if no one is at home, etc.
After I get my iPad, I’ll have to confirm the receipt on Tmall. I have 15 days to do so once the order is placed. Only after that will Tmall approve the transaction and the merchant will receive the money.
My friends who live in the U.S. have all complained to me about how terrible delivery services here can be. But my first few months turned out to be fine — I didn’t lose any packages and always received everything on time, until now.
Amazon’s customer service told me to wait one more day until they could consider the item lost. But I decided to be proactive and checked the buildings nearby, which also belonged to Columbia University Housing, my landlord, because my doorman told me mis-delivery happened a lot.
I went to the building right next to mine. The doorman there said he always collected any packages that were wrongly delivered, and would send them back to the right place if it was one of the surrounding buildings. If my package had been sent there, he would’ve returned it to my building. I found nothing here.
Although I failed to find my package, I did get a better sense from the doorman’s experience of how wrong the delivery service can go. He said he once had to dash out the door and chase after a FedEx delivery man to return a package that belonged to 435 East 119th Street instead of 435 West 119th Street, where he worked as a doorman.
About 1.5 million packages are delivered to households in New York City every day, according to José Holguín-Veras, head of the Center of Excellence on Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ninety thousand packages vanish without explanation each day, mainly because of theft or mis-delivery. Based on the rough estimation of Hoguín-Veras’s team, around 2 percent to 10 percent of packages go missing because they are stolen when unattended after delivery, and about 5 percent are delivered to the wrong place, just like my iPad.
Does this happen because of deliverers’ carelessness or the flaws of the delivery system?From my experience, I’d say it’s the former. How could you send something to the wrong building and tell a customer that the package is delivered? However, Holguín-Veras thinks the reason is somewhere in between. “It’s not only the responsibility of the delivery persons, it’s also the system itself,” he said.
According to him, apartment buildings in New York were not designed to receive packages. A lot of buildings don’t have a doorman, and mailboxes are too small for many packages. When people are not at home, it brings a question to the deliverer — what do I do with your package?
Because of the volume of commercial activity and larger populations, package loss is a huge economic issue in big cities like New York. When people need goods but do not get them because of delivery mishaps, extra money has to be spent to resend packages. Take Amazon as an example: Once it considers an item lost, it will either resend the package or give a refund to the customer. And Holguín-Veras describes the cost for Amazon as “huge.”
It doesn’t look like as if there have been any effective actions taken against package theft or loss. “The complex problems do not have a straightforward solution. Because if they have, they will not be complex,” Holguín-Veras explained, “We might need a combination of technologies and changes in behavior.”
So what happened to my iPad? Finally, I found it in the building across the street. What surprised me was that my package was only one of the many that had been delivered by mistake in the same period. At least five more were sitting in the closet that stored mis-delivered packages.
To be honest, one of the things I miss most about living in China is that the delivery services there seldom go wrong. Because, for most online shopping, merchants will not receive any money until customers confirm receipt of goods, both the online merchants and the courier companies are motivated to cooperate and make sure nothing goes wrong. Whereas here in the U.S., the transaction takes place once items are shipped. This may have caused merchants and couriers to feel less responsible for delivery.
So, when it comes to delivery services, maybe it’s time for the U.S. to learn from its Chinese counterpart.
