Anyone else hear of our modern day, swashbuckling porch pirates? I first saw the term on Nextdoor, a social media site I joined mostly to learn about local fireworks displays and see if anyone was giving away any good free stuff. Suffice to say, I'm engaging pretty minimally with it, although it's occasionally good for a laugh or even some useful information.
As everyone knows, times have changed when it comes to packages. Many of us (and I'm as guilty as anyone else) are ordering things, usually online, that we might have purchased from brick and mortar stores 20 or 30 years ago. This means a constant stream of packages going pretty much everywhere and posing a potentially tempting target. The flipside of this bonanza is that the packages are at least as likely to be, say, underwear or cat food as they are the newest iPhone. In fact, in one of the times when Nextdoor entertained me, someone found an abandoned opened box of CPAP supplies on a street corner. She kindly decided to drive it to the address on the box
We've had a series of package thefts in our condo building. We don't have porches, but I guess you could still call the perpetrators porch pirates, since mailroom pirates doesn't quite have the same ring. Since our building was built in the late 80's, it dates from a time when people were receiving fewer packages. We have a little alcove with our locked mailboxes and shelves for the packages. The going theory is that our porch pirate has been coming in behind residents who are not properly conscious of security (we've received a number of accusing emails to this effect) and then helping himself. Someone isolated a security footage photo of this person and posted it on the outside door. Whether this is to warn him or to shame him, I'm not sure. We're being led to believe that this is a top priority for our city's police....
Since none of our packages have gone missing, I have the luxury of being mildly fascinated by the porch piracy phenomenon. I've been wondering how any of these porch pirates make money off this endeavor. How do they even decide which packages to take? If there are too many to take them all, they have to choose a few, probably quickly. Otherwise, they risk being stuck with the dreaded box of CPAP supplies with no resale value. Even if they were to get something potentially resellable, how do they find a buyer? I have limited experience selling things, but enough experience to know that it's not always easy to find any buyer at all, or in particular to get someone to pay what you think an item is worth. All in all, it seems like a lot of risk for not very much reward.
In the case of our building, I don't think pretending that the residents are willing to get into it with someone trying to follow them into the building is going to solve the problem. I think the problem might cost money, either collectively by paying for some sort of additional security for the packages (e.g. creating a locked package room or paying a doorman) or individually (e.g., people who are worried pay for P.O. boxes and pick their packages up).
Just as I'm as guilty as anyone else of receiving packages, I'm also as guilty as anyone else of sometimes forgetting my own good fortune and getting upset about things that are definitely not matters of life or death. So I'm not trying to shame anyone for being upset about their packages going missing. I know it would bother me, too. But I do think it's mostly a problem that stems from good fortune, both in terms of having the money to buy stuff and having this modern convenience of not having to head to stores every time you want or need something. To name just a few areas of tremendous misfortune in the world, I think many people in Gaza, Syria, or Ukraine would be very grateful if porch piracy were the most dire problem they were currently facing.
