Customer Service is Hard
Drive down any street in a planned community or someplace generally though of as suburbia and you’ll see that virtually every house has both a garage door sized for at least two cars and a front door facing the street. It’s a look I don’t much care for and except for the house I grew up in, I’ve never lived in a house that had this configuration. There’s something about a blank wall of garage doors (and usually the lack of any kind of front porch, too) that screams “STAY AWAY! WE DON’T DO NEIGHBORLY!” Yet most everyone identifies this configuration as the front of the house. My “lived experience” confirms this.
Indeed, it’s common for delivery people to look solely for the garage doors when determining where the front of a house is and a package should be delivered. I’ve learned that when Amazon, for example, sends me a message that a package has been delivered and it’s not at the front door, I have to also check other places on the property – usually on the side of the house with the garage doors. Occasionally, I might get a clue in the form of a picture of the delivery. Here’s one, delivered to my garbage can:
This is a very minor nuisance, until it isn’t. The garage is on the side of the property exposed to a lot of foot traffic and less exposed to general observation by others. So anything delivered there is at greater risk for “porch pirating.” I’ve no doubt this is how I’ve lost several packages. Complaints or efforts to attach some sort of helpful instructions for delivery drivers fall on deaf ears and has made zero difference as far as I can tell. I can only figure that Amazon, in particular, factors this into the cost of doing business as they seem to be the worst offenders. And of course, this isn’t a cost to Amazon. It’s a cost passed on to the rest of us.
Image by ErikaWittlieb from Pixabay