As the frenzy of Christmas and the accompanying parcel season has begun, a nagging question arises.
If we don’t know the date the first package was sent, which we easily imagine as old as the world, we do know when it entered the pantheon of pop culture. In 1993, directed by Robert Zemeckis Alone in the world, a blockbuster movie about a FedEx delivery man, played by Tom Hanks, who finds himself trapped on a desert island. Only one thing keeps him: to return the finished package to the recipient. Thirty years later, it’s estimated that tens of thousands of them are being sent around the world every second, with the holiday season being the busiest, of course. Significant savings for buyers, but with risk. that packet is lost in the back-to-back repositories.
This is also our problem, because hundreds, even thousands of packages are lost every day. When we contacted La Poste, the market leader in France, they didn’t want to give exact figures, putting the onus on the distributors… who also didn’t want to comment. So when a package doesn’t arrive safely, the public service’s explanation is four letters: NPAI “Does not live at the specified address”. This means that the recipient has either moved or their contact information is misspelled.
Abandoned package, profit is at stake
Most of the failures that the 2.0 entrepreneur group have stumbled into follow the postulate that any business can create another business. That’s when what we might call the used parcel business was born. So Lost and Found specializes in the resale of these NPAI packages and promises to sell them at a discount and by the kilo in large warehouses throughout France, claiming to “develop an innovative strategy that benefits both consumers and businesses”. And clearly, it works.
Happy is he who loves Ulysses
Aurélien Jaeg of percheshop.com explains: “I buy tons of lost packages from logistics and then recycle them into 5-, 10- or 15-kilogram boxes. Then the customer buys directly on the Internet or in my warehouse.” Being a businessman, he needs to add his flair. “What’s more, the customer does his job, I authorize him to choose the packages he wants to take, he even feels them, but obviously he has no right to open them. them,” he explains. Excited like children, customers blindly choose which package to put in their shopping cart. In terms of pricing, the head of the Perch-based company makes sure it is as prohibitive as possible: “€10.80 per kilogram.”
Lost and Found, a similar establishment in the Paris region, has more or less the same conditions, except that you can buy from them up to 500 kg (!)… for 4000 euros. Exponential success attracts more and more people who love “good deals”.
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A surprise package
Where the recipe works, it has a double promise. buying a lot of stuff for cheap while not knowing what you’re going to get before you open it is a source of hope…just as much disappointment. Like a slot machine, buying undelivered packages works like a lottery, with the idea that luck is the incentive. If, according to Aurélien Jaeg, the packages are “80% clothes”, there are often beauty accessories, children’s toys or even sunglasses, a product that is particularly desired by customers. But there are pitfalls. it’s possible to have packages containing fake products that you have to destroy yourself because they’re illegal, or just to have a kilo of junk. “You shouldn’t come in thinking you can make a fortune,” cautions Romain, or believing you’re always in the jackpot. This client from Ile-de-France also returned. “I would go to the warehouse near my house every week and even if I didn’t take a lot, I would quickly notice that I was losing money,” he explains. Lured by the promotions, he increased his purchases and eventually “ended up with only trinkets, women’s clothes or plastic things that I didn’t need,” the young man recalled.
But it also happens that some people find what they want. Therefore, the goal is to resell what you find in your package, refund your purchase, or even make small change. Romain explains. “We met thanks to TikTok, and since then we’ve been going there almost every month, and we’ve gained about twenty kilos.” He immediately admits that the idea is to “make a little money”, even if sometimes he keeps a few “gifts”. If the packages he buys, “always back [sa] women”, did not make them rich, thanks to “a lot of high-tech things like connected watches”, they were able to earn a “small extra salary”. If no customer has yet managed to make real savings, and the time/cost savings are not clear, then the pressing issue is a completely different one: ecology.
“Society, you will have me…”
“A couple of years ago the NPAI packages got burnt, since then we can buy them back. My business allows me to put them back on the market,” says the head of Percheshop.com. Indeed, within the framework of the Environmental Code, a set of legal texts related to environmental law, where only the obligation to eliminate so-called “final” waste is already mentioned, the amendment made in 2018 provides that “the landfill of non-hazardous waste is gradually prohibited”.
Of course, these package recovery companies allow products that would otherwise be thrown away to have a “second life”; but they also participate in a mercantile system that bites its own tail; “I consume because these objects exist, but These objects exist because I consume. Moreover, the possession of trivial things seems to be at the center of the circle, because by definition we do not know what we will have. And that’s where it hurts. We buy packages that we eventually resell…before they themselves…are resold.
Source: Le Figaro
