Poland adopted parcel lockers on a massive scale, and they mostly solve that problem. It's such a good idea; I'm really surprised other countries haven't followed suit.
They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.
Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.
Yes I agree with you, I don't understand why parcel lockers are not completely replacing delivery.
I saw on youtube that China has "open stores" where you go pick on shelf your parcel, all controlled via camera and face recognition.
In my country France the number of parcel lockers is going up but there's often sellers who don't propose them, or have some restrictions.
The amazon lockers work fairly well (and I often use them when traveling to avoid the headache of trying to ship something to a hotel.) But I have to say, I don't really understand why you feel they're game changing. You mention that parcel lockers "mostly solve that problem", but I don't really see how they solve any problems in the GP comment. For example, I don't see how they solve the problem of "I want to order something that will arrive in 6 months but I might move between now and then". (won't your package just go to a locker that's possibly very far away from you now?) It feels to me like the main problem lockers solve is preventing mail theft.
The lockers in Poland can be used for both receiving and sending items. It's a massive QoL improvement in many ways over old school:
- you can receive things while you're not at home, don't have to carefully plan to be there for the courier (who then misses initial date and you need to do it again next day). It works 24/7 so you can pick up your stuff in the middle of the night if it's more convenient. You have 48hrs to pick up.
- you can send things, also 24/7, so no need to go to a blessed place between 9am and 5pm during week and queue. You can send your item Sunday evening, no problem
- the costs are also very reasonable. I sent a parcel from Poland to France for 7€ this month.
- you don't actually need to print anything nor even write the address. The courier opens the box, and they print a sticker with destination address.
- I believe it increases throughput because the courier doesn't have to stop at 100 places per day, they stop at lockers and unload N packages at once in every locker. Higher throughput -> shorter delivery times and lower costs
I am not going to repeat the existing comments, instead I will point out something obvious.
Parcel lockers are only really good for small and light items.
The moment you get into heavy or bulky or both then parcel lockers are a waste of time.
Who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul a 16kg package back home ?
Or if you have multiple deliveries, who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul 10 boxes home ?
I think this new Japanese "follow-me" system is genuinely a much better idea. Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
How does the "follow-me" solve heavy delivery?
Heavy deliveries will always be a problem. It existing doesn't invalidate usefulness of things that solve light delivery.
Really heavy deliveries will be. A system that lets you specify a certain weight cutoff for location to deliver might be useful, but even then sheer quantities can be an issue.
I get anything valuable coming from a major delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS, US Postal Service) sent to my office. They're already stopping there (it's a hospital with plenty of doctors' offices in their attached tower, lots of stuff is delivered daily), someone can sign for it and lock it up. I have a key to get into my office whenever I need to, and if it's during the day I can borrow a cart or a dolly/hand truck to take it to my car. Can usually rustle up a spare cart even in the off hours. Done it for almost 20 years.
If it's a TV or something else large (appliances, furniture, etc.), it's going to be a custom delivery anyway, so I'll pick a time that I know I'll be home.
> Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
They're still wonderful for small deliveries, which are maybe 95% of everything I order. You can even redirect them or reschedule them easily, since a lot of it is based on web based systems that you can access with the code they send you and additional verification.
I actually had my computer case ship to a pickup point instead of a locker near me, so I could just go there when I had free time after work and haul it back to my apartment in the city (was like a 10-15 minute walk). It ended up being cheaper than getting it delivered to my door and was functionally identical to a package locker, just with a person verifying the code and giving me the larger item. It seems like some of those locations are in convenience stores, others in gas stations over here, a bit more relaxed than traditional delivery, for which I have to be present at a time I don't know exactly.
For the big items (such as a ladder, or a lawnmower or something for the countryside, or new fridge or stove for the apartment), there is still courier delivery, which brings it to your door, or can help you carry it upstairs if needed, though obviously more expensive and not worth it for anything but the bigger items.
I think all of those methods compliment each other nicely. No reason to scoff at one method if it helps others be more efficient: split up the load, less awkward logistics of the courier needing to talk with each individual recipient to make sure they'll be there in like 15 minutes after the call, but instead being able to take a lot of the less expensive small packages and just put them in the locker and letting the people sort the rest out themselves, handling a bunch of those packages in one go.
I even shipped my old GPU to some friends across the EU with DPD and the process was similarly simple - I just prepped the order online, put the info sheet on the package and put it in the package machine. They received the GPU a few days later. Fewer queues than a postal office.
I’m familiar with postal services both in Poland and Japan and I like the Japanese solution even more - most of the new buildings have package lockers operated by the building owner and independent from the delivery service. Everyone could put the packages there and my building would notify me about a waiting package when I entered.