In December 2018, Google searches for the term “porch pirate” reached a peak. The phrase describes a particular kind of thief unique to modern living: someone who takes packages ordered online and left unattended at doorsteps. Since the pandemic, when a huge surge of Americans started buying much of their everyday goods and luxuries online, many more people have had at least one run-in with a porch pirate.

A New York Times analysis of package theft in 2019 found that 1.7 million packages went missing every day in the US, amounting to a loss of about $25 million a day. In the first year of Covid-19 lockdowns, the United States Postal Service saw a 161 percent increase in mail theft complaints compared to the previous year, a trend that continued to grow in 2021 and 2022. More recent post-pandemic estimates of package theft are harder to come by, but a 2021 Consumer Reports survey of 2,341 adults found that more than one in 10 had a package pilfered in the previous year — and almost two-thirds of that group had been hit twice.

Experts tell Vox that package theft isn’t a massive crime wave threatening to topple home delivery as a whole. As more Americans turn to online shopping as their primary way of buying goods, however, stolen packages are proving an annoyance and frustration for customers, and a looming dilemma for retailers and shipping companies that, with few exceptions, are still figuring out how to address them. For retailers, that is a tightrope act that requires keeping customers happy and not losing money, all while trying to navigate the maze of providing fast, cheap, and secure delivery of billions of dollars of clothes, electronics, medicine, and so much more to every corner of the country.

In this sense, package theft is about more than package theft. It rubs at a bigger question of online shopping and our consumption habits: Is this pace of so much buying and shipping and delivering even possible to keep up without consequences for retailers, for shippers, and for us? Or will consumers of the future have to sacrifice the fast, cheap convenience that has become core to the experience of shopping online?