The holiday season is officially upon us, but while this time of the year brings a sense of joy and excitement to many of us, not everything that comes with it is pleasant.
“Porch pirates” steal millions of packages each holiday season, reported CBSNews in November 2018, which is the time of year that those package thieves typically run rampant.
An estimated 36 percent of Americans have had a delivered package stolen from outside their homes at least once, CNBC reported last year, with research firm Edelman Intelligence reporting that 74 percent of packages are stolen during the day when homeowners are at work.
According to the firm, the average value of stolen packages ranges from $50 to $100.
Last week, I became one of those statistics, when I came home to discover that the two packages I had been expecting were missing. I had received an email earlier in the day that the items had been delivered, but since I was at work, I could not pick them up until the end of the day,
Nearly $90 worth of merchandise purchased online was not there, and as logic would dictate, had most likely been stolen from my front porch while I was at work.
After contacting the seller, a clothing store, I was told by a customer service representative that there had been instances of the U.S. Postal Service marking a package as delivered to meet their daily quota, but not actually delivering it until days later.
I was directed to wait a few days until my promised delivery date — the packages had been delivered five days ahead of schedule — and then call again to have my items replaced or money refunded.
Well, as one can suspect, the requested days passed and the packages had still not appeared on my front porch by the promised delivery date. So, on Wednesday, I called the retailer, explained the situation to a different customer representative and had the items replaced with no problems.
Strangely, the porch pirate ended up actually doing me a favor. I was able to get the initial amount refunded and then was able to repurchase the items at a much lower price than I originally paid because of early Black Friday sales.
All’s well that ends well, as they say, is fitting in this instance. Since I didn’t report the crime and don’t have home surveillance, there are no suspects, but I’ll continue to be on the lookout for a potential porch pirate who may be walking around wearing a hot pink turtleneck.
