Well, hasn't been a great month. First my workbench comes crashing down, and now....$65 worth of detail parts apparently stolen out of my mailbox. I recently moved to a new apartment complex and it seems the mailslots there are like a shopping spree for some of the "residents". One day I went to retrieve my mail and the door to my slot was open. I just figured the postman didn't get it secured good...and my mail was still in there so no big deal I thought. But apparently it had been opened the previous day and the contents removed. My roommate found it opened again and reported it to the apartment office and they put a new, more robust lock on it...but the damage is done. It seems that now every small package is assumed to be an iPhone by unscrupulous persons. I never really worried about online purchases before because the bigger items wouldn't fit and always got sent to the office for safe retrieval there. Obviously I didn't expect my mailbox to be compromised but I never worried about the smaller packages, figuring the didn't have "appeal". Not the case anymore. I eventually discovered that the parts I ordered had a status of "delivered" around the time all this happened. So I can only assume they are lost forever...probably tossed in the trash once they were determined to be of little value on the black market. So, if you haven't already, consider small packages to be "in-demand" for thieves.
That's unfortunate. I had a decoder sent to me via USPS from Tony's Train Exchange in November. It still hasn't turned up and they sent me another finally about two weeks ago. I know that credit cards are stolen out of the mail all the time. Small packages are attractive because they are easy to conceal and may just have jewelry, electronics, or some other valuable that can be exchanged for a few dollars by the enablers among us.
Well that sucks. When we lived in the big city, our mail was delivered to a cluster box and the $%&@# mail person wouldn't deliver any box of any size. He would put in a yellow slip saying customer not at home and the item had to be picked up at the local post station. Of course, I couldn't get it that day as it was still on his truck. And since being retired I was always at home at mail delivery time. Now we live in the boonies, the mail gal drives down our drive way and hand delivers anything that won't fit in the mail box. Go figure. Then again, when heading up a company store at a national convention, I came home to dozens of UPS delivered boxes sittiing in front of my house. I have no clue how long they sat there, but we were fortunate that no one knew that they contained hundreds of boxes of consignment car kits, books, etc.
Our front porch is about ten feet off a sidewalk well used by kids at play, etc. We do not use any form of street delivery, as packages we are not present to personally accept seem to wander off now and then. We use a post office box instead.
When I lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn, NY, nothing was ever swiped or lost. Now, I am in a suburban town and mailman, UPS, etc. have instructions to open the gate to the rear yard and leave the packages there since there are thieves about swiping packages.
I have a lot of things sent to my wife's bookshop simply because they won't be delivered unless she is there and the door is unlocked and she'll be handed the items and can put them aside for me. My doorstep is easily reachable and visible from the street and is not what I would consider a safe location for anything that might even LOOK to be of value.
Most of my packages are sent to my office since my current living conditions are not package friendly. Back in Illinois, I live in a small town of just 450 and the landlords are retired and live next door. They always hold our packages if we are not there. With theft going up, no where is safe, in fact an item has a better chance of "walking" in a rural area as a city cause there are no witnesses. Still, I'll be glad to get out of the apartment complex in Jersey and be back in a house in rural Illinois.
To the OP: If you ordered by credit card, have you called them? You may have a card which covers this sort of theft. To get people to use their cards, some companies add various forms of insurance at no cost. If, for example, the merchant never sends the item, the companies will refund your money and go after the merchant. In this case, it would not surprise me if they would refund your money because the item was stolen in transit. It's worth a try, but next time you might request a more secure method of shipment.
