We left your package in a safe place
These days, many people are more likely to receive large packages by mail than things that fit through a letterbox. This presents a problem for delivery services, given that people are often not at home when attempts at delivery are made. When I lived in Iceland, its postal service had a cunning workaround: packages were delivered during early evening, the reasoning being more people were likely to be home. In the UK, though, couriers and Royal Mail alike appear to be doubling down on the following concept: We left your package in a safe place.
The idea is convenience. It’s more convenient for a delivery service to dump your package than try to deliver it again at a later date (or store it at a depot), but this is spun as it being more convenient for the recipient. After all, you get your package sooner, see? Well, probably. Because the tiny snag with a ‘safe place’ is that most people don’t actually have one. Over the past few years, so-called safe places where packages for me have been left include:
- With a neighbour a quarter of a street away, without Royal Mail actually informing me
- Inside the recycling bin
- On our back doorstep (which was freaky, since someone had to climb over the fence to do that)
- Hurled over a fence into some bushes
- Hidden behind a black (general waste) wheelie bin while we were away for weeks on holiday, during a typically wet English ‘summer’.
The last of those was particularly lovely. My father, checking in on our house, found a sopping wet package “crawling with bugs”. Royal Mail’s response, initially, was to note that packages was “left in a safe place”, the inference presumably being that the package was safe on account of no-one wanting to touch a soggy box guarded by hundreds of bugs.
The Guardian now reports Amazon and the UK government are exploring the viability of drone deliveries. Columnist and journo Alistair Dabbs snarked earlier that “Amazon wants govt to test whether 8 spinning knives landing on your doorstep is safe”. My reaction is more that it will provide even more scope for creative safe-place ‘delivery’. After all, what could be safer than that box-set you’ve been looking forward to for ages being carefully left on your roof, or at the top of a massive tree in your garden?
Just leave a window open, and the drone can deliver the package right to your dinner table.
Royal Mail’s safe place for our house is “under bush in front garden”. Yes, in the mud under a bush. Where it gets wet when it rains (and of course muddy).
Royal Mail are always leaving my packages with the neighbours we hardly see and barely answer the door. Once they went over the fence and through our garden in order to put some packages in our shed. Most notable is that one time (granted it was hermes, not Royal Mail) the deliverer didn’t even bother knocking, they just opened our front door and threw the package in!