Up to a Million Parcels a Day Have to End Up Somewhere

According to the Pitney Bowes Index, parcel volumes flowing out from e-Com-merce companies and into the hands of eagerly awaiting consumers will rise be-tween 17%-28% each year from 2017 to 2021. That is a lot of parcels! To put it into perspective, Canada Post delivered 1 million parcels per day, including week-ends, from mid-November through the 2017 holiday season. That, according to Deloitte, is due to consumers spending 51% of their gift budget on the Internet. In the US the numbers are much more staggering at 850 million packages de-livered in 2017.

Those parcels have to land somewhere. In multi-tenant residential applications, if there is not currently a logistics and cost problem dealing with the incoming parcel traffic, then the forecasted growth by Pitney Bowes may pose a challenge sooner rather than later.

In a building with concierge and/or se-curity services, not only do parcels take up lots of room and cause clutter, they take up a lot of costly administration time recording the parcel’s arrival, storing the parcel, and notifying the resident to come pick it up – hopefully on the first notice.

The temporary possession of the parcel by a building’s staff also opens up a case for liability. Additionally, some build-ings report that a lot of food perishables like groceries are being delivered which require refrigeration.

In non-concierge buildings the parcel problem is even worse. Similar to multi-resident open air developments, parcels can and do go missing. Most online re-tailers ship their goods in well-branded boxes which is a lure to thieves scoping out a home’s porch, or the unsecured and unsupervised building vestibule. Fur-thermore, managers are dealing with violations to the fire code with parcels piling up in vestibules or laying in hall-ways.

Some postal companies offer parcel lock-ers for their own shipments but that does not cover all the other modes of delivery such as FedEx, UPS, Purolator, and Can-par to name a few. That leaves a big gap in which parcels can be managed.