I'm friends with all my neighbors but I find this practice completely bizarre.
And when you're back from hiking the Alps your neighbor will have build a shed around it to protect it from the rain and moved in 10 of his pigs to keep it warm.
Unless of course your delivery guy tied your package to a special tree called Maibaum by mistake. Then you'll find a sign telling you that it has been redirected to one of the 5 villages called Kirchberg in your area.
But instead they just put a piece of paper in your mailbox that says 'you weren't home, we'll come back tomorrow'. Next day same thing. Only then can you go and pick it up at the post office.
Oh and there are many stories of people seeing the mail carrier defaulting to the piece of paper and not even knocking because of time pressure.
Anecdotally, in France, the parcels "delivered by Amazon" have hands down the best service. They're the only ones who've ever actually delivered the parcel to my door (I live in an apartment). If they can't leave the parcel in the mailbox, they'll call me up and ask what to do, usually offering to come back some other day if I'm not at home.
If the item fits in your mailbox (letter size), they do that.
If not, they knock, and leave a "we missed you" note if the package is insured. Or leave it on the doorstep if not.
If you get the note, you have to go the post office in two days, during normal office hours (9-5ish), or Saturday morning (9-12). If you don't make in a few days, they return to sender.
But this is only for USPS. If the package is FedEx/UPS/courier, it's the wild west. Sometimes they leave it. Sometimes they leave a note. Frequently they claim they attempted delivery but didn't. And if they miss you a few times, you have to pick it up at the distribution warehouse which could be a 30 min drive away. This is the worst - even for items you know need a signature, there's no guarantee they'll deliver - we ran into this a few months ago with some jewelry - delivery was schedule Monday 12-5pm, we waited in the living room (right by the door) and nobody came. Their system showed a failed attempt (courier lied). Repeated Tues. Called courier warehouse, they asked if we had doorbell video proving the delivery attempt was never made (WTactualFuck). Repeat on Wed. Item was returned to sender. We called sender, asked them to use USPS because private shipping can be a disaster. USPS is often a day slower, but it's fairly reliable.
Some areas have problems with package theft. Fortunately mine isn't one of them, so I'm ok with packages being left.
This is one of several reasons I no longer buy anything from Amazon. Not even if it's the cheapest source. Even if it gets to a Filiale, those are further than most of the shops that would sell similar items.
It's rare the Amazon sends something via them, but whenever they do, I expect to not get the package. And when I don't, I just call up Amazon support and complain about them and make it a point to mention I often have issues with that specific company. They usually offer to cancel the shipment and reship overnight. Don't know if they can actually control it or if it's coincidence, but all reshipments have been via Amazon.
It's difficult to figure out exactly where the facilities are and you're not guaranteed the package won't still be on the original truck or on a new one.
Additionally, it's common that no delivery attempt is made at all -- the delivery driver will walk up to the door with a "we missed you we'll try again someday" slip already filled out and won't even knock.
The main reason we are cool with deliveries being left on the porch isn't that we trust our neighbors, it's that the alternative is so much worse.
when I lived in the urban core of a top 10 population US city, I still trusted my neighbors
another comment said the US still had "remnants" of a high trust society. I grew up in that high trust society. I am not old.
if our high trust society is gone, we should do whatever is necessary to get it back. It's clearly a better way to live.
If the latest shipment of crap from Amazon/Temu went missing. Annoying, but you'd just tell them the package got stolen and get a replacement sent out.
The problem is that there are people who drives through residential areas looking for packages to steal, cars to break into, etc. and that occurs quite frequently, as caught on our security camera.
It doesn't take many motorized perpetrators to lower the overall confidence in how secure it is to leave packages outside, given how much range the porch pirates can cover in a single afternoon.
No lol, you just enter the tracking number of the missed delivery tag into the carriers website and they tell you where to go pick it up.
It's not unknowable; FedEx and UPS at least will reattempt delivery every day for a certain number of days before giving up. At least that's the case in urban and suburban environments. Maybe you live somewhere rural where their policy is less clear?
> It's difficult to figure out exactly where the facilities are
No it's not. The tag they leave behind will often tell you, or you can enter the tracking number online and it'll tell you there. And usually it's the same place every time, so once you figure it out, you're good for future packages.
> and you're not guaranteed the package won't still be on the original truck or on a new one
This is the annoying thing. It's never clear when the package will actually get back to the facility (after they failed to deliver it to you), so you don't actually know if it'll be there when you show up. Many many years ago it was a simple matter of giving them a call, but nowadays you end up in customer support / phone menu hell, and it's incredibly difficult to talk to someone who is actually physically present at the facility.
> The main reason we are cool with deliveries being left on the porch isn't that we trust our neighbors, it's that the alternative is so much worse.
I'm absolutely not cool with this. I trust my neighbors just fine, but I don't trust all the random people who might be walking around, specifically looking for packages to steal.
I'd much rather have to drive over to a facility to pick up the package, or just wait until the next day for another delivery attempt, but most delivery drivers don't give me that choice.
If the package does get stolen (incredibly likely, if it's left outside), I'll usually have to wait several days for the merchant to ship a new one (because they figure it's possible it wasn't stolen, and want me to wait and see if it still gets delivered in a day or two). And then I have to wait for another shipping-time cycle.
They claim this, but my experience is that it's not true. VERY VERY often, it will be multiple days or up to a week before they attempt again. Sometimes they never attempt again, and a week or more later I get the notification that it's available to pick up at their depot. It's certainly not consistent enough to rely on.
Yeah, in a city I would expect the mail person to leave a receipt in your mailbox.
In the countryside, though, that's not unheard of :-)
Just like I would easily leave my bike unattended and unlocked in the country side but not in a city.
Places in the US that have high level of porch piracy also have high levels of gun control, and low levels of gun ownership.
You have to really want my $5 towel to risk your life doing that around my parts of the US
It varies greatly depending on where you live. My sister lives in suburban Maryland, and leaving a package outside on a porch is just no big deal. The probability that it gets stolen is actually ridiculously low. In this case the high trust is completely warranted.
I live in San Francisco, and if a delivery person ever leaves a package outside, it's always a scramble to either get there to take it in, or find a neighbor who can do it for you. (I live in a 4-unit condo building, so we all try to look out for each other's packages when this happens.) It's just bizarre to me that delivery people aren't specifically instructed to never leave packages outside here. I suspect they may be, but they're overworked and don't want to have to add yet another package to their delivery schedule for the next day. And/or they may be evaluated on number of completed deliveries, no idea.
(On the flip side, there are some neighborhoods in SF where it's ok for a package to sit on a doorstep for a while. Not many, but... they exist.)
But the US still seems to have some remnants of a high trust society, which has been only a temporary thing in many places, if at all.
Not having such a society adds frictions in all kind of interactions. In the end, that means cost. I can understand why people and company try to shift that cost when it comes up in areas where it wasn't present beforehand.