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Bloomberg
Amazon’s Prime Day gives shoppers an opportunity to flex their deal-spotting muscles ahead of Black Friday. It also gives package thieves their own chance to warm up.
Although the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas see far more parcel deliveries—and therefore, more brazen from-the-stoop thefts, Prime Day’s limited 48-hour window creates a concentrated opening for “porch pirates†to make their move, said Brody Buhler, managing director of Accenture’s post and parcel industry group.
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many cardboard boxes are pilfered from plain sight around the invented summer buying spree, since customers can report thefts to one of three sources—the local police department, the retailer or the mail carrier—and those reports aren’t tallied centrally. But according to research from video-doorbell company Ring, 19 percent of US households had a package stolen at some point in 2017 with an average value of $140 per package.
Nextdoor, a social-networking app, says user comments about package theft spiked 85 percent between July 18 and 20 last year, the main delivery period for Prime Day packages.
“Criminals know about Prime Day—everyone has access to the internet these days,†said James Crecco, a police captain in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The police department in Jersey City partnered with Amazon in December to run a sting
operation and track down package thieves after hearing from a swelling number of victims of porch piracy. Within just seven minutes of placing the first package, officers made an arrest and ultimately caught 23 robbers over an 11-day period. The department has been thinking about implementing a similar plan in the days following Prime Day, though Crecco said it was waiting to see if Amazon would partner again before renewing the programme.
Of course, on-the-porch delivery isn’t a new phenomenon in the US, with Montgomery Ward launching its dry goods mail-order business and Sears, Roebuck and Co’s iconic catalog serving as America’s consumer bible for a century.
But the proliferation of e-commerce brought delivery of goods—and chances to pilfer them—to a whole new level.
E-commerce accounted for more than 10 percent of all retail and food service sales in the first quarter, up from about 3 percent in 1999, according to the Commerce Department.
Orders come in all year long, especially as grocery delivery expands, but they’re concentrated around big shopping events. During last year’s Prime Day, members bought more than 100 million products. Amazon has expanded this year’s extravaganza to 48 hours from 36 last year, with Coresight Research forecasting Amazon raking in $5.8 billion globally in sales, up from $3.9 billion in 2018.