The rise in online shopping has produced big shipping increases for the Postal Service and its competitors, but not everyone welcomes the delivery surge.
Many apartment landlords are being swamped with packages. Some say they’re spending too much time sorting the parcels and running out of space to store them.
Camden Property Trust, the nation’s 14th-largest apartment operator, has stopped accepting packages at its 169 properties across the nation. Executives say each parcel means 10 minutes of lost productivity for its workers, costing the company more than $3 million a year.
“Ultimately, this was going to eat our lunch,” Keith Oden, Camden’s president, told The Wall Street Journal last week.
Other property managers are taking different approaches.
Avalon Bay Communities Inc. has experimented with installing package lockers — similar to the gopost lockers that USPS operates — while Equity Residential has mandated height and weight restrictions for packages.
Other buildings are turning janitors’ closets into package rooms.
Residents aren’t interested in reducing their deliveries.
“Package delivery is almost a basic amenity. It’s almost like they just told us that they’re going to stop doing maintenance,” Braden Christian, a Camden Property resident in Houston, told the Journal.