Parcel locker
Based on Wikipedia: Parcel locker
The Robots Are Holding Your Packages
Somewhere in Poland right now, a person is walking up to a metal cabinet in a gas station parking lot, punching a code into a touchscreen, and watching a small door pop open to reveal their new headphones. They'll be home in ten minutes. They never spoke to a delivery driver. They never missed a delivery while at work. They never had to wonder if their package was stolen from their doorstep.
This is the parcel locker revolution, and it's far bigger than most people realize.
Poland alone has nearly 54,000 of these automated pickup points scattered across the country—the highest density of parcel lockers per capita anywhere on Earth. That's roughly one locker for every 700 people. A company called InPost controls almost half of them, having placed their first machine back in 2009. Today, receiving a package in Poland often means a quick detour to the nearest shopping center or petrol station rather than waiting anxiously at home.
The Problem These Machines Solve
The challenge is simple but maddening. You order something online. The delivery company attempts to deliver it while you're at work. They leave a slip. You call to reschedule. They attempt again. You're still at work. Eventually, someone leaves it on your doorstep, where it either gets rained on or stolen.
This problem has only gotten worse as online shopping has exploded. The rise of single-person households hasn't helped—there's simply no one home during business hours to accept deliveries. Students, young professionals, anyone with a nine-to-five job faces the same predicament.
Parcel lockers elegantly sidestep all of this. The delivery driver deposits your package in a locker. You receive a code. You pick it up whenever you want—at seven in the morning before work, at midnight after a late shift, on Sunday afternoon. The locker doesn't care. It's just a robot waiting for you to enter the right numbers.
Germany's Twenty-Three Million Users
Germany's version of this system, called Packstation, has become genuinely enormous. Run by DHL Parcel Germany—a division of Deutsche Post, the country's postal service—Packstation launched as a pilot project in 2001 and never stopped growing. By 2025, more than 15,500 machines dotted the German landscape, positioned so that 90 percent of the population lived within ten minutes of one.
Twenty-three million Germans have registered to use the service. That's more than a quarter of the country's entire population.
The system requires registration through an online portal. Users receive a magnetic stripe card, affectionately nicknamed the "Goldcard," along with a personal identification number. The security measures have evolved over time. Originally, customers could simply punch in their customer number and PIN. Then in 2011, DHL mandated the physical card. The following year brought mobile transaction authentication numbers—essentially one-time passwords sent via text message that expire after a single use.
The newest Packstations can communicate directly with smartphones via Bluetooth, eliminating the need for codes entirely. Your phone becomes your key.
Who Builds These Things?
An Austrian company called KEBA manufactured the original Packstation machines and continues to supply equipment across Europe. They also built Austria's nearly identical system, called Post.24-Station, which launched in November 2006. Vienna's stations appear in supermarkets, petrol stations, and post offices—anywhere easily accessible by public transport.
But KEBA isn't alone. Estonia's Cleveron manufactures terminals for SmartPOST, a Finnish company operating parcel networks across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Latvian company PostService builds its own machines entirely in-house for its "My Post Station" network spanning 27 cities. Even Costa Rica's postal service manufactures its own locker systems domestically.
In France, Portugal's Bloq.it is supplying more than 13,000 lockers for Vinted Go, the logistics arm of the secondhand clothing marketplace Vinted. These appeared in Franprix, Carrefour, and Casino stores starting in 2022, instantly creating one of the largest parcel locker networks on the planet.
The Amazon Effect
Amazon, predictably, built its own parallel universe of lockers.
Amazon Locker launched in September 2011 in New York City, Seattle, and London. The concept mirrors the European systems: order something, select a locker as your delivery address, receive a code, retrieve your package within three days. By June 2018, the service had expanded to more than 2,800 locations across 70-plus cities.
The company partnered with retailers willing to host the distinctive orange kiosks. 7-Eleven signed on, as did the British grocery chains Co-op Food and Morrisons. Staples and RadioShack tried the program briefly in 2012 but withdrew the following year—an early hint that not every retail partnership would stick.
The University of Warwick in England claims the world's largest Amazon Locker. Named "Ivory," it contains 115 individual compartments and sits near the Rootes building, serving thousands of students who can't receive packages in their dormitories.
Amazon has since expanded the locker program to Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy. In 2017, the company announced plans to install lockers in Whole Foods locations following its acquisition of the grocery chain.
The Hub Variation
Amazon Hub takes a different approach, targeting apartment buildings rather than retail locations. These lockers accept packages from all carriers, not just Amazon's own delivery network. After a beta period from 2017 to June 2018, Amazon opened the program to all property management companies in the United States.
A staffed version called "Amazon Hub Locker+" appeared in 2020, allowing customers to pick up packages too large for standard lockers and return items without finding their own boxes.
The limitations are worth noting. Not every Amazon order can ship to a locker. Third-party sellers using FedEx or UPS—carriers that often require signatures—may not support locker delivery. Some packages are simply too big. And lockers occasionally fill up, leaving customers waiting an unspecified amount of time for space to open.
The Global Patchwork
What's striking about parcel lockers is how independently they've evolved in different countries, often with completely different operators and business models.
Russia embraced the technology enthusiastically, with multiple major players competing: Logibox, PickPoint, QIWI Post, Yandex Market, and Russian Post all operate networks. Romania split between Sameday's easybox and Fan Courier's FANbox. Slovakia developed an ecosystem where packages can go to lockers run by Slovenská pošta, Packeta, GLS, or the electronics retailer Alza.sk.
The Baltics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—have Venipak, Omniva, DPD, and Latvijas Pasts all operating locker services as of 2022.
Some systems emerged from unexpected places. In Bangladesh, a partnership between ekpay (part of a government digitization initiative) and the e-commerce platform Daraz created ekShop-Digibox lockers at metro stations. Notably, these were manufactured entirely within Bangladesh and reportedly cost far less than Western or Chinese alternatives.
The United Arab Emirates got its first automated delivery machines in 2011, manufactured by KEBA and operated by a courier company called Parzel Express.
Turkey's national postal service, the PTT, began installing domestically produced Kargomat lockers in 2019.
Australia Post operates pickup facilities near post offices. Ireland had ParcelMotel—a service that ran from 2012 until January 2023, offering not just local pickup but a UK address for Irish customers wanting to take advantage of free British delivery offers.
The American Lag
The United States, despite being Amazon's home market, has been comparatively slow to adopt parcel lockers beyond Amazon's own network.
The United States Postal Service announced a program called "gopost" in 2011, with permanent installations finally beginning in August 2014 at 17 locations in New York City and Washington, D.C. The service never achieved the scale of European systems.
A Canadian startup called BufferBox, founded in 2011, caught Google's attention and was acquired in November 2012. The service was subsequently suspended, a casualty of Google's habit of buying promising companies and then abandoning their products.
New York City is now running a pilot program called LockerNYC, expanding to 70 locations in an effort to reduce both package theft and truck traffic from delivery vehicles double-parking throughout the city.
Pharmacy Lockers: A Special Case
Several manufacturers have adapted the parcel locker concept specifically for prescription drug pickup.
These pharmaceutical lockers appear at pharmacies and in remote locations where accessing a pharmacy might be difficult. One design includes an integrated audio-visual connection so customers can consult with a pharmacist remotely before retrieving their medication—maintaining some semblance of the professional interaction that traditionally accompanies prescription pickups.
Costco pharmacies have deployed drug pickup lockers. CVS Health has piloted them. A shortage of pharmacists in the 2020s increased pressure on the industry to adopt automated solutions that could reduce the workload on overstretched pharmacy staff.
The legal landscape complicates matters. While prescription drug delivery by mail is common throughout the United States, some states have laws that specifically prohibit unattended locker pickup. Georgia, for instance, doesn't allow it. The reasoning presumably involves concerns about controlled substances, verification of identity, or simply regulations written before the technology existed.
The Pandemic Accelerator
When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, parcel lockers suddenly looked prescient.
Retailers scrambled to meet exploding demand for home delivery while managing costs and, crucially, maintaining contactless solutions that minimized human interaction during a respiratory pandemic. Parcel lockers checked every box. No delivery driver ringing your doorbell. No signature required. No face-to-face exchange at all—just a customer, a machine, and a code.
The technology reduced logistics costs while providing what marketers learned to call a "frictionless" customer experience. The pandemic didn't invent parcel lockers, but it made them suddenly seem essential rather than merely convenient.
Beyond Packages
The locker concept has expanded beyond commercial deliveries.
Polish libraries have deployed machines for retrieving and returning books—essentially a vending machine for literature that operates around the clock. This extends library access beyond the building's opening hours, letting patrons pick up holds at midnight or drop off returns before dawn.
West Sussex libraries in England have operated Amazon Lockers since 2012, an unusual partnership between a public library system and a commercial retailer.
The Infrastructure of Convenience
What parcel lockers represent, ultimately, is infrastructure—a new layer of urban machinery that most people barely notice until they need it.
The networks are expanding. France's parcel locker market is growing rapidly, with InPost, Amazon, and Vinted competing for locations. Germany's Packstation network continues to densify. Poland keeps adding machines to maintain its global lead.
The appeal is straightforward. Modern life doesn't accommodate waiting at home for packages. Work schedules are inflexible. Delivery windows are vague. Package theft is rampant in many cities. The locker sits patiently in a gas station or shopping center, holding your purchase hostage against a six-digit code.
It's not glamorous technology. There's no artificial intelligence, no blockchain, no revolutionary algorithm. Just steel boxes, touchscreens, and software that matches codes to doors. But sometimes the most useful innovations are the boring ones—the infrastructure that quietly makes daily life a little less frustrating.
Somewhere in Poland, another locker door is clicking open right now.
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