[traviswingo]

True. Delivery drivers consistently deliver to my neighbor instead of myself. The last three digits of our addresses are 885 and 855, and they consistently confuse the two. They’re tired, overworked, underpaid, and I honestly don’t blame them. But I wouldn’t trust anyone in my garage/home when I’m not home. Not sure why these companies think that will actually work.

[Eisenstein]

They think it will work because if you refuse to do it they won't refund your stolen package unless you file a police report, and convenience with huge downsides wins with consumers 99% of the time over effort with no downsides.

This is just conjecture, btw, I have no authoritative knowledge of their plans to do anything.

[mindslight]

As things are, missing packages are not really a police matter for the recipient. Recipients don't actually know that a package was stolen, since it never made it into their possession. Amazon could certainly file police reports, but that requires a higher bar of evidence than throw-and-go delivery service provides, and either way it Doesn't Scale (TM).

I'd guess it's more likely the opposite dynamic, where they'll get a bunch of early adopter types to sign up without thinking through the ramifications. And then after the honeymoon period, Amazon will start demanding those users file police reports for missing packages since from their system it now looks much more airtight that the package must have been stolen from the buyer.

[20after4]

That's assuming that the delivery driver isn't defrauding both amazon and the customer.

[dboreham]

In US homes the garage is often a way to access the house with minimal security between the two.

[fnordpiglet]

That’s not true, the garage typically has a full outdoor door with standard security (dead bolts, wired into the security system) the same as any other door as the interface door between the garage and the house. This is a code thing for a variety of reasons but primarily because the outdoor door is weatherized and provides a barrier against CO, but also for the precise reason that the garage door is not considered secure. The protocols for opening the door wirelessly are known insecure and municipalities have required outdoor doors at the interface due to the number of home invasions and burglaries through the garage.

[rurp]

At least in my experience people are a lot more likely to leave the garage door unlocked than the front door, either intentionally or unintentionally.

[abustamam]

Agreed. Our garages have always had three entries: one from the house, one via garage door, and a side door. Side door was always locked, garage door always closed (never locked though), and the door between house and garage not only almost never locked, but often flat out open because that's where we put the litter box.

[leeoniya]

haha, our litter box is there as well. vinyl floors in mudroom are easiest to clean.

[phil21]

It's functionally true. Thinking off the top of my head I can come up with at least a dozen examples growing up of friends w/ these doors. Not a single one was ever locked. Most of the time w/ school-age kids they would be left purposefully unlocked so the kids could let themselves in after school w/ the garage door PIN code.

I honestly can't think of a single person I know who routinely locks those doors.

[sib]

I've lived in many houses in the US (eight, some new, some older, in five states) and only one had a deadbolt on the door from the garage to the house interior. All have had normal locks and were exterior-door-quality. So, definitely not a universal truth.

[leeoniya]

i also keep expensive things in the garage: onewheel, a couple good bikes, a lot of nice tools. i assume this is true for quite a few homeowners.

[Humdeee]

Not to mention... a car, as there's a car theft crisis nearly everywhere in the past 2-3 years. I consider the garage just another room in my home. I consider entering my garage akin to entering my house

[BobaFloutist]

Sometimes garages even have cars in them!

[dheera]

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as

Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5)

or

Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5)

or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them.

As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc.

Alternatively put an apartment number on your house (there will be only one apartment, of course.)

One of you will be

855 Foo St. Apt. 1

The other will be

885 Foo St. Apt. A

[xp84]

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack.

This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.

[dheera]

The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it.

If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St."

If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.

[xp84]

I'm sure that sometimes happens successfully as you describe, but having worked in ecommerce for a long time, many larger retailers will throw addresses like that either back at the customer until they "fix it" or to a queue where customer service will attempt to "fix it" including by calling you. The carriers (like FedEx etc.) really like standardized addresses. So this could result in delays in getting your order.

[seemaze]

I've got an 80% hit rate at best across all carriers (in the US). I'm constantly trading mail with my neighbors due to mis-deliveries. It's a good thing we now have the option to go mostly paperless for important documents at least..

[dharmab]

Heck, I get food misdelivered to me at times! I might as well be a last mile delivery service

[dharmab]

I use it for expensive items. My garage door opener has an integrated security camera.