Shortly after moving into their renovated brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, at the end of 2019, Jordan Slocum and Barry Bordelon began experiencing a problem that now consumes many urban dwellers: package theft.
“It was three or four packages, over the course of a few months,” said Mr. Bordelon, 40.
The issue was compounded when Mr. Slocum and Mr. Bordelon, who work together as renovation bloggers and project managers under the name Brownstone Boys, began accepting deliveries for some of their clients’ renovations.
“It was becoming quite stressful,” said Mr. Slocum, 38. “We’d be at meetings and get a UPS notification, and have to leave immediately as we knew there was a thousand dollars’ worth of product sitting on our stoop.”
They weren’t alone. In 2019, an analysis conducted for The New York Times found that 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing across the country every day, with 90,000 packages disappearing in New York City alone. In 2020, 43 percent of respondents to a national survey conducted by C & R Research reported being victims of package theft, up from 36 percent in 2019.
ParcelBin (from $695), a lockable parcel delivery box made by CitiBin, a Brooklyn-based company that got its start making enclosures for trash and recycling.
Parcel Lockbox S100 (about $60) and ParcelWirx plastic tubs from RTS Home Accents (from about $122).
Successful implementation of any of these units requires asking delivery companies to use them, and sharing the combination. Typically, users share their combinations via online profiles with companies like Amazon.com, UPS and FedEx.