Your Package Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Mis-Delivered

By Dominick Romeo

A building superintendent’s job consists of many things. From the obvious daily maintenance and cleaning – to the not so obvious; bringing the temperature down between two feuding residents. But we also try our best to bring your packages to you while fending off porch pirates and package thieves throughout the year.

There is no better season for porch pirates than during the holidays, which for them, starts the week after Thanksgiving and continues through the first week of January. This is also when your supers are on high alert. We usually know who they are, by use of our building’s security cameras, and we prepare for their visits each year.

I kick off this season by posting pictures I’ve collected of grinches who stole Christmas in the past and I post a warning to them on the front door facing the street. I follow this with an email to my residents with a subject line reading, “T’IS THE SEASON TO BE LEERY – PACKAGE THIEVES ARE ON THE RISE AGAIN,” and I ask them not to ring strangers in. These efforts, and more that I will share with you later in the year, have significantly brought down the number of thieves entering my building all year long. And this past Holiday Season, for the first time since I’ve been the super here, there were no packages taken from us. These package thieves have gotten the message to go somewhere else.

Because of the close relationships that a building superintendent develops with their tenants, often when a resident is missing a package their first phone call isn’t to the courier – it’s us!

“Sorry to bother you, Dom, I know it’s late. But did you see a package for me today?” I respond with, “I’m not sure. I brought down all the packages in the lobby, but do you have an alert with a timestamp for this delivery? I can look through the video footage in the morning.”

Ninety nine percent of the time, when I look through the footage, I find that their package never made it to our building, nor had any couriers entered our building in the time mentioned in the alert. So where did their package go?

It was mis-delivered…

Sometimes UPS, FedEx, Amazon, DHL and other couriers will mark your package as being delivered when in fact it was left on their truck overnight. This happens because they simply want to go home early and will deliver your package the next day. I’ve even seen alerts that say the package was handed to the building super — obviously not the case.

Most packages that go missing in our buildings, that never make it to our mailroom and were not lifted by a thief, were actually delivered somewhere else. I know this because I too get packages that are meant for other addresses on my block. I walk those over to nearby buildings. But there are other packages for buildings that could be as far as ten blocks away. Because I do not have the time to deliver those, I’m forced to throw them out.

When we call these couriers to inform them of a mis-delivery, we are told that we are not the recipient and there isn’t anything they can do for us. Or, when I see the Amazon delivery person (the worst offender next to FedEx) who mis-delivered a package to our building, they refuse to take it and deliver it to its proper address.

Amazon used to list the recipient’s phone number on their labels, and this helped us call the owners who eventually picked them up. But Amazon stopped this practice early last year and there is no way for us to get these packages to their owners so we are forced to throw them away. Hundreds, if not thousands of packages per month are going in the trash because of this. Companies are simply replacing the item that got lost, stolen, or more likely, mis-delivered. This is a colossal waste of resources that only seems to be getting worse as we receive more of our goods through the mail.

A new online trend has been created on forums in NextDoor.com and on Facebook’s neighborhood pages, titled “Does Anyone Know Where This Lobby Is?” A neighbor will ask the group to identify this location in hopes of picking their package up later.

In some cases, the person asking gets lucky and that lobby is identified. But often times this is not the case, and then the cycle begins again – with a resident asking their super if they saw their package, then posting a notice online titled, “Have You Seen My Package?” like a lost child on the back of a milk carton – then calling the courier responsible for this mis-delivery, only to get a replacement of a few days later.