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Re:Amazon Hub by dmix on Thursday July 27, 2017 @07:33PM (#14870705)
> And it's US only.

There are already competitors operating here in Canada doing this stuff fortunately. I believe Amazon acquired one of them which turned into this [nm, see edit]. That should hopefully pressure Amazon to expand and this will offer tons of free advertising for those smaller companies competing.

Edit: turns out it was Buffer Box and they were acquired by Google and (of course) shut down https://www.wikiwand.com/en/BufferBox

InPost is another one with boxes all over Europe. They recently shut down in my city though :/ (Toronto). But otherwise it looks pretty like they have extensive deployment: https://inpost24.com/

Germany has DHL Packstation: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Packstation

Also two startups: https://wefunder.com/swapbox and http://www.ucella.com/

Re:Amazon Hub by ccozan on Friday July 28, 2017 @03:38AM (#14872641)
The Packstation of DHL is great. What also DP/DHL did, is to make every little shop a micro-postoffice. Probably gave them some incentives, but it works great if you are not at home, you can be sure your package is at the store max 5 mins from you
Re:Amazon Hub by rosege on Thursday July 27, 2017 @10:09PM (#14871371)
Australia has Parcel Lockers run by the post office for free - they are pretty good https://auspost.com.au/parcels-mail/parcel-collection-delive...
Re:Amazon Hub by will_hughes on Thursday July 27, 2017 @11:10PM (#14871653)
But only for packages which are delivered through AusPost. Which if you buy stuff internationally, it mostly isn't.

Also, not in a ton of locations.

Re:Amazon Hub by lucaspiller on Friday July 28, 2017 @05:58AM (#14873139)
It's the same situation here in Lithuania - various companies have these lockers but it's hit or miss who an international package will be delivered by. Even from Amazon I've had packages delivered by DHL, UPS and regular mail.

The post office will give you a forwarding address (for regular mail) that will end up in the locker of your choosing, but you then have to pay €x/package, and the lockers are usually at post offices, so it's not really worth it.

Re:Amazon Hub by ajdlinux on Thursday July 27, 2017 @11:32PM (#14871754)
IDK, the vast majority of my international purchases have been delivered by AusPost - it's actually domestic PC parts shops and eBay sellers that I have the most problems with as a lot of them choose to use companies like Fastway and don't make it clear on their websites who they ship with.
Re:Amazon Hub by rosege on Friday July 28, 2017 @01:17AM (#14872153)
I dont think so, I've had everything delivered there and never had an issue. My only exception is if its something where they say no po box - then I havent tried.
Re:Amazon Hub by dpi on Friday July 28, 2017 @12:22AM (#14871942)
I've had four Amazon packages delivered to Parcel Lockers in the last two months.
Re:Amazon Hub by vertex-four on Friday July 28, 2017 @05:49AM (#14873110)
InPost is essentially useless in the UK, mind... there's essentially no retailers that support it, you can't have arbitrary packages from retailers posted to one, and I've literally never seen someone using my local InPost box to send packages. I'm assuming they're burning through investment money badly. To show how little people care about it: it doesn't even have an English-language wikipedia page.

If they could somehow have the postal service and couriers able to post things to InPost boxes, it'd be far more useful - but I suspect there's some really complicated contractual stuff that prevents that.

Re:Amazon Hub by gutnor on Friday July 28, 2017 @07:00AM (#14873329)
In the UK, PassMyParcel is good.

Your parcel get just delivered to your local NewsAgent, which in the UK generally has extensive opening times. Supported directly by Amazon and a bunch of retailer, but delivery companies use the same system (DPD, EPS).

Re:Amazon Hub by iamed2 on Friday July 28, 2017 @10:53AM (#14874660)
Canada Post provides this service. My building has a parcel rack and they just put a numbered key in your mailbox when you have a parcel. No need for codes or phones.

For those who may not know, Canada's national postal service is the largest parcel carrier in Canada.

Re:Amazon Hub by nexxer on Friday July 28, 2017 @04:10AM (#14872782)
The public post office in Cyprus [0] has 3 of those machines (1 for each big city).

SMSes get sent to you as notification, and you have 3-4 days to pick it up. After that (and a second notification), it gets sent to your local post office and a delivery note is sent to your house.

No charges yet for the service, though they have been toying with the idea ever since it launched a few years ago. No charges for packages not getting delivered either.

[0] http://www.mcw.gov.cy/mcw/dps/dps.nsf/page25_en/page25_en?Op...

Re:Amazon Hub by mabbo on Thursday July 27, 2017 @08:38PM (#14871022)
For the longest time, Buffer box had one location: inside the Google Waterloo office.