Amazon Key Lets Couriers Into Your Home, Exactly Like You’ve Never Wanted

Thanks but no thanks

Amazon is constantly trying to come up with ways to make our lives better — from Alexa ordering pizza for us to Siri singing Bohemian Rhapsody, they’re constantly thinking outside the box. Their newest innovation, however, goes outside of the box, through your front door, and walks out with your flat screen TV and a pair of your underpants. It’s called Amazon Key, and it’s an idea that falls on the high end of “problematic.”

Today, Amazon announced a new service called Amazon Key that will allow Prime members to have their packages delivered inside their homes. Yes, that means that if you order an Amazon In-Home Key Kit (which includes a security camera and smart key lock and starts at $249) you can allow delivery drivers to open your front door and leave your packages inside your house.

In the coming months, you’ll also be allowed to grant access to friends, neighbors, cleaning services, your dog walker, your drug dealer, that guy down the street who wants to take a shower…any-damn-body you want.

“Wow, what a great idea,” said no one. “I’ve always wanted a way to let a variety of strangers into my home,” said no one in a follow-up conversation.

We went to Twitter to check out some of the reactions there. They were…not great.

Yup, that about sums it up.

We understand that not all delivery drivers are thieves, and we get that they’re supposed to leave the packages just inside your front door and not, for example, in the middle of your bed while you’re taking a shower. But unlike friends and neighbors, chances are you don’t know the name and address of every person who delivers an Amazon box to your house. And the included security camera is great, but it just seems like a more convenient way to watch someone lick your coat rack while you’re at work.

Amazon Key also allows your door to be unlocked for a maximum of five minutes, which I guess is supposed to make us feel better but sounds like a long damn time to me. Think about it — how many things could you grab from your house in five minutes? You already go back in for your kids’ backpack and their one missing shoe and your sunglasses and their trombone and get back out again in less than 30 seconds. Five minutes? You could probably move a couch in that time.

Amazon also promises that drivers will knock first, but they don’t specify how they will knock. There’s a big difference between three quick knocks and three slow, heavy knocks — one means business and one means getting chased by a man while you run away in your bathrobe. There’s also a difference between a polite knock on your front door and a polite knock on your second-floor bathroom window. Do you see what we’re saying, here? Amazon needs to be a little more specific.

Now, there are a lot of people who deal with package thieves, and this would indeed be a way to stop them. But how does allowing strangers into your house seem like the right solution to stopping strangers from stealing your stuff? It’s like saying, “No one can steal from me if I just give them all my stuff.” Good thinking, Scooter. Way to outsmart everybody.

Come on, Amazon. Next time, run your ideas by a woman, first. It would have saved you a lot of trouble this time.

“So, here’s the idea: what if we made it so that drivers could just open your door and–”

“No.”

The end.