WSJ Your Money Briefing - Some Shoppers Are Buying Delivery Insurance to Combat Package Thieves

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

In the battle against porch pirates, online shoppers can now buy insurance to protect their purchases. Wall Street Journal reporter Imani Moise joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss how the coverage works and other ways shoppers are fighting back this holiday season.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exchanges. The Goldman Sachs podcast featuring exchanges on rates, inflation, and U.S. recession risk. Exchanges on the market impact of AI. For the sharpest analysis on forces driving the markets and the economy, count on exchanges between the leading minds at Goldman Sachs. New episodes every week. Listen now. Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, December 6th. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Tis the season for porch pirates to steal those holiday gifts you ordered.

A new startup offers insurance to help victims recover their losses. If you are a person that's experienced porch theft in the past, you know you're already susceptible to it, it might be a good idea if you typically buy a lot of high value things online. So TVs or furniture, artwork, it could be a good idea. We'll talk to Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Amani Moise after the break. Amazon Q Business is the new generative AI assistant from AWS because many tasks can make business slow, as if wading through mud. Luckily, there's a faster, easier, less messy choice.

Amazon Q can securely understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline tasks. Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time. Q got this. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. Americans have shelled out money for things like doorbell cameras, expensive lock boxes, or self-service locker rentals to cut down on package theft by porch pirates. A new insurance startup offers another option.

Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Amani Moise joins me. Amani, how much worth of merchandise is stolen from outside of people's houses each year? So last year alone, about 119 million packages were stolen and those were worth a total of $13 billion. In one year? In one year, and that's according to Capital One. According to a different survey by Value Penguin, about 41% of Americans had at least one package stolen

last year. Count me lucky, because I haven't had a package stolen yet. Knock on wood. Does package theft swell during the holiday season? Absolutely. Experts say that package theft is really a crime of opportunity. And when you think about it during the holiday season,

there's more opportunities just because people are getting more packages. How have thefts impacted how people track delivery of their packages? A lot of people have become much more vigilant, whether that's just keeping track of the tracking information online, keeping track of where their packages are,

or buying doorbell cams so that they can actually see and get a notification when things are dropped off. And people have gotten kind of inventive in the way they protect their packages, right? Definitely. In response to this story, I heard from one reader who sent a photo of his front porch in Portland, Oregon, where there's two separate lock boxes, three doorbell cams,

and several signs indicating to delivery people where he wants his boxes dropped off and locked up and secured. This same person also said that one time they left an Amazon box full of sand outside of his house as a decoy just to deter thieves and it worked. And it worked. Do retailers provide any kind of insurance against package theft? Yes. So a lot of times retailers will have insurance policies with the shippers. So that'll be the post office, FedEx, UPS. But the thing about that insurance is that it ends as soon as the package hits your porch.

Or as soon as it's on your property, it's no longer their liability. So then it's the consumer's responsibility at that point. Yes, but a lot of consumers don't feel that way, especially if they weren't at home at the time of delivery. So they'll usually either write to the carrier, to the shipper, or to the retailer. And a lot of times, the retailer

will go ahead and either refund or replace that item because they don't want to lose a customer. You see this footage on the news all the time, people stealing packages. They do it in broad daylight. Yep, broad daylight when no one's home. They've gotten very savvy. We had a story a few weeks ago about iPhones and how certain porch pirates have figured out that AT&T uses similar tracking numbers to ship a lot of its iPhones. So they were actually following the delivery trucks and swiping them as soon as they hit the door. How about people's homeowners policies?

Does that typically cover this kind of theft? Yes, but the financial advisors I spoke to advised against filing claims with your homeowners insurance or your renter's insurance for package theft because those policies are subject to deductibles, which can be very high. So say you have a $500 deductible and you had an $800 iPhone stolen, that would mean that you're paying $500 to get $300 back. A company called Porch Pals launched this week and offers delivery insurance. How does it work?

Porch Pals is a membership service for $120 a year. They let their customers file up to three claims a year for a total value of $2,000. And you link your credit or debit card and any purchase delivery that is made with that credit or debit card is covered. So if you tell porch files, hey, I never got this package, it was stolen, here's the footage, you don't even have to submit footage, they'll replace your item. When should somebody buy the insurance? If you are a person that's experienced porch theft in the past, you know you're already

susceptible to it, it might be a good idea if you typically buy a lot of high value things online. be a good idea if you typically buy a lot of high value things online, so TVs or furniture, artwork, it could be a good idea. But you also have to keep in mind that if you're in a building that gets hit by porch pirates multiple times a year, you can only file three claims. So the financial advisors that I spoke to said you kind of have to be smart. So if you get a $40 sweater swiped, maybe don't file that claim.

But if it's an iPhone or a laptop, that could be a good use of a claim. With the holiday season in full swing, what are some ways that people can protect themselves from porch theft that don't cost any money? The cheapest way to avoid having a package stolen is to require a signature at delivery. But that's also the least convenient,

especially if you don't work from home or maybe you're doing things at home and not able to run to the door as soon as a delivery gets dropped off. Or even less convenient, you could go pick up that expensive item at the warehouse or in store, and then you don't have to be afraid of thieves.

There are also locker companies, similar to an Amazon locker that you might see at a Whole Foods, but they're retailer agnostic, where you could pay rent to either pick up a certain amount of packages per month, or you can pay per package. So a lot of those services will charge you around $4 to $10 per package. So people have been online shopping on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and now they're expecting to see their package

on their doorstep when they get home. If it's not there, what's the first thing to do? The first thing is to pull up your tracking information with the shipper. That way you should be able to see whether or not it should be at your door or whether or not it's still in the shipper's network. If it's marked delivered, then your next step should be to contact the retailer, explain what's happened, that you don't see the package. They may ask for some documentation, but in most cases, they'll probably offer you a refund or a replacement

because they want to keep you as a customer. That's WSJ reporter Amani Moise, and that's it for your Money Briefing. Tomorrow we'll have our weekly markets wrap up, What's News in Markets? And then we'll be back on Monday. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu. I'm your host, JR Whalen. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Melanie Roy.

Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are our deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. Thanks for listening.