They always have something cruel. They also scream like that, those red NO stickers on your mailbox.

No, no groups. Advertising is prohibited. There is no seller at the door. No papers from door to door. There are no neighbors’ cats in my garden.

(Okay, I made that last one myself.)

But this week I saw a more drastic variant: No, we don’t take packages for the neighbors. Fear is everywhere, and as befits a good social mediator, two camps have sprung up on Twitter with overly simplistic opinion peppered with finger-pointing arguments.

I joined the peace-loving camp for the first time. this decal? A- social. You’re just doing it for your fellow man. Furthermore: it has a thing, that accepting packets back and forth. It provides that amount of social cohesion in the streets where people basically live behind their own curtains. We may no longer have the Jan-Terlouw chain of mailboxes everywhere we can insert each other, but we do have each other as collection points. sweet.

Until I read tweets from the hate camp. Among them are people who quietly opened the door five times a day as well, after which the entrance began to move away from the distribution center in Zalando. Because, too, I tried it myself: You start with a lightweight clothes box – “but of course, no problem” – and end up with someone else’s deluxe XXL garden set including hanging chair and umbrella. Oh, and the neighbors will be back from Cape Verde in just two weeks, so could he be with you that long?

We collectively suffer from shopping sickness and no longer only buy when we need something, and when we have the opportunity to do so, we also buy when we are in bed, sitting on the toilet, buying things that we accidentally buy on a blank passing hour,” coincidentally, I needed To it we just” think,” so calculated, in fact it didn’t need it at all,” our algorithm knows.

In our desire to order, Bol’s promise “ordered today, delivered tomorrow” has become a requirement, it doesn’t matter if we are at home, the weather is declining. Those boxes, those plastic wraps, CO2 emissions (250,000 tons per year), are pretty bad, but we take all of that for granted. Because: 92 percent of ordered packages are simply delivered at home – and a good portion of them are returned too (the sender can reappear). So there are millions of packages making the unnecessary trip from distribution center to truck to customer to truck to distribution center each year.

What is effective for one may be exploitative for another. In distribution centers, they are faced with a huge shortage of personnel. I recently heard a package delivery person say on the radio that she didn’t have time for lunch. And then you may say: we must hand over everything to the collection points, but they also give up, because it hardly pays off. I spoke to the shopkeeper where I picked up my packages (my hands are firmly in my lap here, listen). “They lined up outside my store. I had to hire one extra man every day to handle the influx of packages.”

Our self-built parcel system creaks and squeaks at the seams and actually requires only one important label:

No more ordering together.