Locker installed at Richmond 7-Eleven

GRAHAM MOOMAW
Amazon.com
January 3, 2014
A self-service Amazon.com locker has been installed at the 7-Eleven store at 1003 W. Grace St., offering an alternative delivery method for customers who don’t want packages left at their homes.
A yellow behemoth named Wallace stands in front of a local 7-Eleven store, holding about 40 locked boxes filled at any given moment with whatever Richmonders have ordered on the Internet.
Amazon.com has offered self-service delivery lockers in major cities such as New York, Seattle and San Francisco, but the option has now been extended to urban Richmond via the 7-Eleven on West Grace Street behind the Village Café near Virginia Commonwealth University’s academic campus.
The company describes the service as a “secure and convenient” alternative to home delivery, which carries the risk of packages being stolen or going missing before reaching the hands of the intended recipient.
When checking out, Amazon customers can choose to have their package delivered to the locker for no extra charge, according to the company’s website.
The customer is then given a code to punch in on the locker’s keypad when the package is ready for pickup.
Customers have three days to retrieve their package once it arrives at the locker or it will be returned to Amazon and the purchase refunded, according to the website.
Because not everything sold on Amazon can fit in a locker, purchases must weigh less than 10 pounds and meet other size restrictions. Items also can be returned through the service.
An Amazon spokeswoman said the lockers were first introduced in Virginia in mid-2012, but declined to provide details on how many exist today.
“While we don’t discuss specific numbers when it comes to our lockers, we are excited to have added lockers in the Richmond area,” company spokeswoman Nina Lindsey said.
Two more lockers named Rex and Martin are located at Amazon’s fulfillment centers in Chesterfield and Dinwiddie counties, according to Amazon’s website, but neither is open to the public.
The company’s website shows about a dozen lockers in Northern Virginia, each personified with a name, but none in Hampton Roads.
Employees at the 7-Eleven on Grace said the locker has been there a few months.
The locker gets plenty of use, according to the store’s employees, but on a recent afternoon, several 7-Eleven patrons said they had no idea what it was.
Just after making a return at the nearby Redbox movie kiosk, Matt Zook questioned why anyone would want a package delivered somewhere other than their house.
“I’d rather not mess with this,” Zook said.
VCU student Brandon Lind said he’d consider using the service, depending on what he was ordering.
“I guess if it was expensive enough that I didn’t want it to sit on my porch, I’d use it,” Lind said.