Comments

• By PaulRobinson 2025-05-296:308 reply

  This is a good start. I have a registered code, I can update it whenever I move house, online ordering becomes easier, great.

  As people have indicated in thread already, the current implementation is easy: a website frontend just needs to be able to resolve it to the physical address.

  I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.

  Going further, I might want to specify my home address as the default, but for items under 2kg delivered 8am to 5pm on weekdays, please deliver to my place of business. If I'm in hospital for a prolonged stay, I may want to redirect to a friend or family member.

  I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.

  [edit: there's also a nice bit of privacy going on here the later the lookup happens - if nobody at the e-commerce site knows where I actually live, that information can't be leaked]

  By miki123211 2025-05-2910:314 reply

  Poland adopted parcel lockers on a massive scale, and they mostly solve that problem. It's such a good idea; I'm really surprised other countries haven't followed suit.

  They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.

  Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.

  By guerby 2025-05-2910:541 reply

  Yes I agree with you, I don't understand why parcel lockers are not completely replacing delivery.

  I saw on youtube that China has "open stores" where you go pick on shelf your parcel, all controlled via camera and face recognition.

  In my country France the number of parcel lockers is going up but there's often sellers who don't propose them, or have some restrictions.

  By KetoManx64 2025-06-025:04

  Things like that are only viable in high trust homogenous societies. Sadly a most of the western countries don't have that any more

  By traceroute66 2025-05-2912:173 reply

  I am not going to repeat the existing comments, instead I will point out something obvious.

  Parcel lockers are only really good for small and light items.

  The moment you get into heavy or bulky or both then parcel lockers are a waste of time.

  Who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul a 16kg package back home ?

  Or if you have multiple deliveries, who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul 10 boxes home ?

  I think this new Japanese "follow-me" system is genuinely a much better idea. Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.

  By szszrk 2025-06-0810:18

  I do.

  I do that all the time. So does my wife. Especially if she has a baby stroller to use.

  Or we just pull by the locker on our way somewhere, it takes just 2 minutes.

  So do our neighbors who do the same. That's how I buy all my house chemicals, electronics, diapers. That's how I got a bulky coffee machine as well.

  Multilockers are great too. Wife does a lot of tiny clothes transactions (both buy and sell), so it's great to have 4-5 things in one locker, picked up instantly. All is in an app, but can be a text message as well.

  It's insane how big that revolution is. My elderly mom confirms. I can't possibly imagine that someone would actually say it's not convenient after seeing how it actually works. The only failure I see here is that it would be hard in a high crime rate areas. That is something technology can't really change easily.

  By marcosdumay 2025-05-2914:371 reply

  How does the "follow-me" solve heavy delivery?

  Heavy deliveries will always be a problem. It existing doesn't invalidate usefulness of things that solve light delivery.

  By devilbunny 2025-05-2919:13

  Really heavy deliveries will be. A system that lets you specify a certain weight cutoff for location to deliver might be useful, but even then sheer quantities can be an issue.

  I get anything valuable coming from a major delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS, US Postal Service) sent to my office. They're already stopping there (it's a hospital with plenty of doctors' offices in their attached tower, lots of stuff is delivered daily), someone can sign for it and lock it up. I have a key to get into my office whenever I need to, and if it's during the day I can borrow a cart or a dolly/hand truck to take it to my car. Can usually rustle up a spare cart even in the off hours. Done it for almost 20 years.

  If it's a TV or something else large (appliances, furniture, etc.), it's going to be a custom delivery anyway, so I'll pick a time that I know I'll be home.

  By KronisLV 2025-05-2921:36

  > Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.

  They're still wonderful for small deliveries, which are maybe 95% of everything I order. You can even redirect them or reschedule them easily, since a lot of it is based on web based systems that you can access with the code they send you and additional verification.

  I actually had my computer case ship to a pickup point instead of a locker near me, so I could just go there when I had free time after work and haul it back to my apartment in the city (was like a 10-15 minute walk). It ended up being cheaper than getting it delivered to my door and was functionally identical to a package locker, just with a person verifying the code and giving me the larger item. It seems like some of those locations are in convenience stores, others in gas stations over here, a bit more relaxed than traditional delivery, for which I have to be present at a time I don't know exactly.

  For the big items (such as a ladder, or a lawnmower or something for the countryside, or new fridge or stove for the apartment), there is still courier delivery, which brings it to your door, or can help you carry it upstairs if needed, though obviously more expensive and not worth it for anything but the bigger items.

  I think all of those methods compliment each other nicely. No reason to scoff at one method if it helps others be more efficient: split up the load, less awkward logistics of the courier needing to talk with each individual recipient to make sure they'll be there in like 15 minutes after the call, but instead being able to take a lot of the less expensive small packages and just put them in the locker and letting the people sort the rest out themselves, handling a bunch of those packages in one go.

  I even shipped my old GPU to some friends across the EU with DPD and the process was similarly simple - I just prepped the order online, put the info sheet on the package and put it in the package machine. They received the GPU a few days later. Fewer queues than a postal office.

  By ChadNauseam 2025-05-2911:481 reply

  The amazon lockers work fairly well (and I often use them when traveling to avoid the headache of trying to ship something to a hotel.) But I have to say, I don't really understand why you feel they're game changing. You mention that parcel lockers "mostly solve that problem", but I don't really see how they solve any problems in the GP comment. For example, I don't see how they solve the problem of "I want to order something that will arrive in 6 months but I might move between now and then". (won't your package just go to a locker that's possibly very far away from you now?) It feels to me like the main problem lockers solve is preventing mail theft.

  By jakub_g 2025-05-2913:57

  The lockers in Poland can be used for both receiving and sending items. It's a massive QoL improvement in many ways over old school:

  - you can receive things while you're not at home, don't have to carefully plan to be there for the courier (who then misses initial date and you need to do it again next day). It works 24/7 so you can pick up your stuff in the middle of the night if it's more convenient. You have 48hrs to pick up.

  - you can send things, also 24/7, so no need to go to a blessed place between 9am and 5pm during week and queue. You can send your item Sunday evening, no problem

  - the costs are also very reasonable. I sent a parcel from Poland to France for 7€ this month.

  - you don't actually need to print anything nor even write the address. The courier opens the box, and they print a sticker with destination address.

  - I believe it increases throughput because the courier doesn't have to stop at 100 places per day, they stop at lockers and unload N packages at once in every locker. Higher throughput -> shorter delivery times and lower costs

  By rawicki 2025-05-2911:481 reply

  I’m familiar with postal services both in Poland and Japan and I like the Japanese solution even more - most of the new buildings have package lockers operated by the building owner and independent from the delivery service. Everyone could put the packages there and my building would notify me about a waiting package when I entered.

  By szszrk 2025-06-0810:27

  That's actually rad, but... it's not that different from making current mailboxes bigger. In PL in large buildings those are on ground floor, next to each other. If you make them bigger you only need to add notifications to match that.

  By thesuitonym 2025-05-2913:453 reply

  > You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site.

  That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.

  By r00f 2025-05-2915:031 reply

  I am not sure about your particular area, but all those concerns have been solved for me. If I get package in my local mailbox (which is always nearby), I get a key to the delivery box dropped into my mail box. If the package doesnt fit there, I get message like "box 5 code 123456" if it is at self pickup site, or I go to the post office - which are both 5 minutes drive, but for box of such size I would need to drive even to my local mailbox.

  I will prefer any of those options over my package having to sit in the rain or on the snow.

  By thesuitonym 2025-05-2915:191 reply

  I'm familiar with apartments and trailer parks, and from experience I can tell you it's a worse system than just delivering door to door.

  By the_sleaze_ 2025-05-2915:251 reply

  I tend to agree. As I understand it it's the final mile that balloons the cost and in my view a neighborhood collections box is just a micro-optimization. Same with mass dropoff box truck. You're already driving a vehicle with my package nearby just deliver it at that point.

  What I want is cheaper shipping if they drop it off at a post office or something. For example on Amazon I see it as an option but only ever as a "carbon-reduction" vs just delivering to my front door. I know it's cheaper - pass on those savings to me.

  By meatmanek 2025-05-2916:37

  The irony is that in many cases, it'd take less carbon for them to deliver to your front door than it would for you to get to the post office -- if they're already delivering to someone else near you, their extra distance traveled might be a block or so (or 0 if they were going to drive past your house anyway).

  For delivery-to-post-office to be more carbon-efficient than them delivering to your house, the inequality (additional distance you need to travel to get to post office / your mpg) < (additional distance they need to travel to get to your house / their mpg) must be true. If you were gonna drive past the post office anyway, or your vehicle is significantly more efficient than their delivery van, then it might pencil out. If you're making an extra trip, it probably doesn't make sense.

  By hx8 2025-05-2914:531 reply

  > No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.

  With where I live now, yes. I've had a previous address with about a 15% package-theft rate within the first 2 hours of package delivery. In this situation I started to use lockers instead of straight to home.

  I think this type of delivery system (mobile lockers to stationary lockers) would be a hit in areas with high levels of package theft.

  By lokar 2025-05-2915:41

  Or the police could deal with package theft.

  By tester756 2025-05-2918:03

  >And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement?

  You enter the code from sms, that's it.

  By sojsurf 2025-05-2916:54

  > I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.

  The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?

  The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?

  By luis_cho 2025-05-297:062 reply

  For me the privacy part of site not knowing we’re I live would be great.

  I could also black list entities from delivering spam.

  By hbarka 2025-05-2911:101 reply

  My mailbox is full of junk mail and it’s hard to make them stop. It’s not even addressed to me, just the mailbox location. The design pattern to “unsubscribe” or block the junk sender is also useless. Surely there must be a strong political lobby in the US who don’t want to prevent junk mail. It’s so wasteful and ridiculous (literally tons of paper) and I’ve resigned to this fact of life in my country.

  By powvans 2025-05-2912:07

  Marketing mail is a significant (maybe 25%) portion of the USPS revenue and very profitable. They have a strong disincentive to reduce the stream of junk mail going to your home.

  By saati 2025-05-2911:17

  What stops them from sending the spam to the same code?

  By tester756 2025-05-2918:02

  >I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.

  Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up

  You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell

  They disrupted delivery industry

  By pjc50 2025-05-2910:47

  > at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes

  I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.

  I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.

  By SwtCyber 2025-05-298:532 reply

  Not having your address passed around 3rd-party sellers is a win on its own

  By dooglius 2025-05-2916:18

  This seems worse for that though, now they can track you better when you move and correlate with your identity better.

  By chgs 2025-05-299:281 reply

  But they could look up your physical address and store and sell that easily as storing and selling your delivery address now.

  By lmm 2025-05-2911:46

  The third-party seller never gets your address. They hand the package over to the delivery company with a code, the delivery company is the only one who knows what that code means. Japanese delivery companies already offer this service, since a lot of people don't like to publish their address.

  By BlueTemplar 2025-05-299:251 reply

  > I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.

  Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.

  I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.

  By eloisant 2025-05-299:48

  It's funny how you have a Social Security Number used for everything except provide you with actual social security.

• By chmod775 2025-05-293:567 reply

  > Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.

  Why not just let people mail to that code, and the post office then looks up the actual address? That'd also avoid any issues with leaking personal information.

  By nine_k 2025-05-295:012 reply

  > Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.

  Apparently he new system works a bit like DNS: the physical location may change, but the symbolic name stays. The resolution is done at the order time, not at the delivery time.

  I suppose it's because the numerous e-commerce sites already support the physical address system. With the post office resolving the 7-character symbolic address to a physical address requires approximately zero changes in their existing systems, it's just an extra API call on the frontend. Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

  Also, the 7-character address resolved to a physical address right before the customer's eyes works as an extra sanity check, and should limit the number of orders to a wrong address.

  By lobochrome 2025-05-295:35

  Also there is an existing system of 7 numeral post codes that autopopulate Prefecture, City, District - leaving you to enter Area # (丁目）, Block #, House #.

  If they amend this to make it alphanumeric and then autopopulate this last three datums - it fits very neatly into the existing scheme.

  By chmod775 2025-05-2917:111 reply

  > Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

  No, it doesn't. You can just format that 7-character address like a valid address, essentially like:

  番号０１２３４５６,日本

  Fill any extra fields with placeholders or ０s as necessary.

  The most you'll have to change is to maybe skip validation for those if you have address validation.

  By nine_k 2025-05-2919:131 reply

  > skip validation

  Here's whence real problems would begin.

  By chmod775 2025-05-306:36

  What? That sort of vague dismissal with likely zero reasoning behind it doesn't really deserve a reply, but here you go anyways:

  Many places don't even do address validation for regular addresses, because it's generally dogshit and either too lenient to be useful, or too restrictive to not filter out lots of valid addresses. Even Amazon just checks that the postal code and city match, nothing more. You can put in an entirely made up street name and they'll happily try to ship it.

  If you really want to have validation, you can add parity bits to the number, so you can validate it fully client side.

  As a business you may learn an address is no good when you're trying to request and print the digital shipping label - that is if you're lucky and the provider does any validation at that point for your in-country shipment (for international shipping there's usually simply none besides checking that they can route it at least to whoever they hand it over to). Worst case you'll get a return.

  For these IDs the provider should be able to tell you pretty quickly they can't route the package, unlike when the customer gets their house number in their regular address wrong, which is usually only caught once the deliveryman learns that nobody with that surname lives there. If you're lucky he'll remember you live on number 21, not 12.

  In any case as an online retailer you'll already be dealing with lots of returns anyways - invalid addresses is just one of many reasons your shipments don't reach the customer. Anyone who does shipment has a processes to handle these anyways. Using numbers that can be quickly determined to be correct/incorrect should actually improve things.

  So again: What are you on about?

  By brody_hamer 2025-05-294:10

  Easier to roll out this way would be my guess?

  With your approach, the burden is on the post office to update their handling process.

  With the implemented approach, nothing changes about the postal process, and the burden of work is shifted to the sender, who must look up the code for the recipient’s current address.

  By WhyNotHugo 2025-05-2910:28

  This sounds like cross-shipping, where you ship to a distribution centre which then ships to the final destination. My guess is that this is more expensive and slower for a lot of cases (this is typically cheaper for extremely high volumes or cross-continental shipping).

  Shops with which I’ve worked will have several different carriers pick up packages during the week. Some pickups are for city-local packages, where others are cross-province packages. Finally, lots of packages are delivered from the shop directly by motorbike. The logistics are quite different for each, and they use different providers depending on situation.

  Shipping everything to one location that redistributes would explode in both costs and complexity.

  By crusty 2025-05-296:181 reply

  Maybe they will, but this seems to be separate in that if it resolves the physical address from the code during the checkout process like a DNS call, it isn't reliant on actually shipping with Japan post and even if it does, it now has the physical address, so why not use that.

  One thing about the long physical address is that it adds a bit of redundancy. Misspelled or wrong name... still arrives. Misspelled street or city... might still arrive. I'm guessing 1 number off on that code and it's wrong. For the example in the story, a customer inputs the number, three store makes the call to Japan post and renders the physical address to the customer so they can verify before committing.

  By BlueTemplar 2025-05-299:28

  Surely they won't be so incompetent the specifications won't include a correction code and mandatory checking of it ?

  By coel 2025-05-296:551 reply

  The address would need to be looked up in some cases due to different delivery costs and time estimates.

  By ChocolateGod 2025-05-297:43

  I'm sure having a publicly available API that shows the region a code is in would be fine as long as the courier honours pricing based on that information.

  By grishka 2025-05-2911:07

  I imagine things would get complicated if private courier companies start getting involved

  By xyst 2025-05-294:353 reply

  Imagine inputting: "IiIIil" but meant to input "IiIIi1"

  Oops now my package is going to Joe Blow on the other side of the country.

  That’s probably why.

  By _Algernon_ 2025-05-296:50

  If my password manager has an option to not use similar looking characters when generating a password, it should be trivial to do the same for this system.

  By saulpw 2025-05-294:501 reply

  25^7 is 6 billion, and there are fewer than 200m people in Japan. That's enough for one character to essentially be error correction.

  By voxelghost 2025-05-296:031 reply

  25^6=244,140,625 - I think I have seen estimates of 100,000,000 addressable entities in the Japan postal address system (a bit half of them being households, the rest companies,public buildings, various organizations and so on )

  By saulpw 2025-05-298:001 reply

  TFA says "seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters".

  By voxelghost 2025-05-306:221 reply

  Yes absolutely. But my comment was just to confirm what you were saying about 25^7 (with one control digit) i.e. 25^6 would be enough to cover everything that is addressable in the system today. If we increase that to alphabet+ numbers 35^6, it is even more feasible.

  By saulpw 2025-05-3015:51

  Oh, I see, thanks for clarifying.

  By pjc50 2025-05-2910:49

  Given that this is Japan, they probably just mean digits 0-9, which are quite often rendered that way rather than 一 to 九.

• By halpow 2025-05-2817:284 reply

  Japan is the perfect place for this because their house numbering system already requires you to look at a map to find it.

  For those unfamiliar with it, numbers are incremented progressively around a block as doors are added to it. So the door "Block SanChome 4" could be on the opposite side of the building from "Block SanChome 6"

  By pezezin 2025-05-290:142 reply

  It is even more complex than that: within a neighborhood you have "chome", then blocks, then buildings. All three levels are numbered chronologically and don't follow any kind of logical order. Oh, and streets don't have names. Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.

  So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.

  * I don't know if there is a translation for this word.

  By Tor3 2025-05-292:27

  Indeed - at least now you can enter the property address (e.g. a four-digit number followed by a dash and another number, as in this small town) into google maps and it'll show you where it is. Not long ago it was more like driving in the general direction while hanging on the mobile phone and trying to agree on a landmark (e.g. a 7/11 or a tower or an office building) while trying to find the place. Before mobile phones? Well, there's this big big sign in a park near the town center, and on that you can find family names on a kind of map.. of course that had this assumption that Nobody Never Moves. So, no, I don't know how people did this in the past.. "Where the Streets Have No Names", the U2 song. I wouldn't have imagined, but that's how it is.

  By xandrius 2025-05-2920:51

  > Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.

  The good old: ask a local about it. Nowadays people seems so against just stopping a random passerby to ask them a question. (obviously not feasible with the huge amount of deliveries we do today but back then it would have been reserved for the very rich or rare occasions)

  By sabellito 2025-05-2817:512 reply

  This won't change. The article starts:

  > Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.

  Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.

  By bobthepanda 2025-05-2818:24

  I don’t think they’re saying that the system is intended to replace old addressing but that the new proposed system is fine because the old addressing system, like this new one, is not very good at providing intuitive physical wayfinding anyways.

  By elif 2025-05-2818:242 reply

  Also useful for anyone who wants their personal residence recorded in less databases

  By montroser 2025-05-2820:291 reply

  Yeah but now it's a personal identifier that actually moves with you when you move to a different physical address. In terms of privacy, that might just be worse.

  By pezezin 2025-05-290:151 reply

  How do you plan to order anything from an online shop without the shop knowing your delivery address?

  By klausa 2025-05-296:35

  You put a trusted intermediary (JP Post) that knows the address in the middle, and provide the seller with an identifier that the intermediary can associate with your physical address.

  That’s already how it works if you buy something trough the online marketplaces here - Mercari et. al.

  Mercari knows addresses of all counterparties, but the label that the seller puts on the package doesn’t have the destination address, and the label the package has when it reaches your door doesn’t have the seller’s address either.

  By Freak_NL 2025-05-2818:51

  Doesn't it just give the shop a way to fetch the full address from some public API? I don't think you can just jot down that number on a box and have it delivered.

  > Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.

  By Asooka 2025-05-2915:17

  This is pretty much how we do it in Bulgaria as well, with almost all residential apartment buildings having no street address, it's just "City region X, building number Y". Online maps services are almost unusable for some places because they simply do not want to handle any system other than "street name + street number".

  By SwtCyber 2025-05-299:03

  In that context, something like a stable digital address actually makes way more sense