Porch Pirates Love This Time of Year

Package season is ramping up, and so is the version of it nobody likes: the empty porch where a box used to be.

A few things that actually work:

Deliver to the garage. Amazon Key and similar services open your garage door, drop the box inside, and close it. Free with most smart garage openers, and the single best fix there is.

Use pickup lockers for the good stuff. Electronics, gifts, anything you'd be sick about losing. Amazon lockers, UPS Access Points, and store pickup exist for exactly this.

Make the camera visible. Doorbell cameras don't just record thieves, a visible one sends most of them to the next porch entirely.

Redirect when you're away. UPS My Choice and FedEx Delivery Manager are free and let you hold or reroute deliveries so boxes don't stack up announcing you're gone.

Know your neighbors. Still the best security system ever invented. The block that texts each other "package on your porch, grabbed it" loses almost nothing.

Steal one of these before the holiday shipping season hits and thank yourself in December.

Which one are you actually going to set up? Share it, and if you've got a porch pirate story, I'm listening. Those are always wild.