Economy

Porch Pirates Ruin Holidays for 59 Million Americans

Paul Ausick

Published: December 12, 2019 2:10 pm

More than half of American adults expect to shop online during the 2019 holiday season. They could spend nearly $167 billion on gifts, and virtually all those gifts will be delivered either to the buyer or to the gift’s recipient. Many other holiday gifts purchased in brick-and-mortar stores are also delivered to someone else.

“Many” might be an understatement. UPS alone expects to deliver 750 million packages during the 2019 holiday season. The U.S. Postal Service expects to deliver another 800 million, with 200 million in just five days from December 16 to December 21.

During last year’s holiday season, 26.1 million Americans reported that a package was stolen from their porch or doorstep. So far in 2019, nearly 60 million Americans say they have been victimized by a so-called porch pirate.

The data was reported last week by insuranceQuotes.com, based on a telephone survey by SSRS, who interviewed 1,005 U.S. consumers.

Nick DiUlio, an insuranceQuotes.com analyst, commented: “As online ordering continues to grow in popularity and increasingly become the norm for shoppers, the threat of porch pirates will inevitably continue to grow as well. While package theft takes place all year round, the holiday season is prime time—and consumers ought to know that there are available solutions out there that are effective as well as convenient.”

A UPS store manager in Middleton, Wisconsin, Dylan Lund, told a local TV news reporter that nationwide a total of 1.7 million packages a day will go missing during the holiday season. Figuring that there are 55 days between November 1 and December 24, that adds up to more than 93 million packages, even more than InsuranceQuotes.com estimates will be victimized by porch pirates in all of 2019.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that more than 90,000 packages a day are stolen or lost without explanation in New York City. A study in Seattle indicated that first delivery attempts fail as much as 15% of the time, meaning that the delivery service has to try again, which is both expensive and wasteful.

The insuranceQuotes.com survey also noted that 6 million Americans protect their homes (and packages) with a home security system, while 59.4 million send deliveries to a work address. More 36 million send deliveries to an Amazon locker or similar service, and 33 million use package lockboxes.

Property crime has declined in recent years but still remains extremely prevalent in the United States. No city is completely crime free, and every state has at least one city where crime is far more prevalent than in others — these are the American cities with the most property crime in every state.