According to the FTC, if a vendor ships stuff to me that I didn’t order, I am legally allowed to keep it. This is great news for me. A couple of months ago, a vendor shipped me $350 worth of cleaning supplies I never ordered; I quickly gave them a courtesy call to let them know they’d screwed up, and they said they’d follow up but never did, so I’ll be selling them on eBay some time soon and pocketing the funds.
In a separate incident, today FedEx delivered to me some packages intended for someone down the street, apparently not noticing our house number in giant characters across the top of the garage door. :rolleyes: I’ve been on hold with them for half an hour now trying to set them straight, but I guess they’re all busy watching cat videos.
Hypothetically speaking, what does the law say about keeping items that were delivered to a wrong address?
As this is a legal question, it’s probably in the wrong forum (reported).
IANAL, but for the items that were delivered to the wrong address, no, I don’t think you can or should keep them. As you said, they live down the street. If you can’t reach FedEx to come and pick-up, next time you’re out, just drop the items at the driveway of the correct address. It’s the neighborly thing to do.
Out of curiosity, instead of sitting on hold with fedex for an hour, why not just walk the package down the block and put it on their porch. It seems like it would be less of an inconvenience than the current plan.
Anyway…If a company sent you a package, I believe they are allowed to arrange to get it back and you probably can’t deliberately make that more difficult for them.
I don’t know if there’s a time limit on that before it’s legally yours. In any case, it should be noted that the law didn’t come about because of someone accidentally mailing something to you. It came about because companies would mail things to people, unsolicited, and then send a bill and expect it to be paid. That’s now illegal.
This is at least the case for the USPS, I think, but I’m not positive, it extends businesses like UPS/FedEx/DHL etc.
What you have going on is entirely different. A misdelivered package, something that was simply delivered to your house, but doesn’t have your name or your address on it you’ll likely have to return. I’ll have to look, but I saw something not long about someone getting a TV that way.
I can tell you that Amazon doesn’t give a flying frick when they deliver someone else’s package to you. I got a box with two different address tags on it (which meant that there was an unlabeled package I was supposed to get still on the truck!) delivered to me. It was full of toddler toys and board books.
I called Amazon, and they told me they were not coming to pick it up, and eventually the person who ordered it would figure out they weren’t getting it, and request redelivery.
I had a nagging suspicion, put the box in my car, and took it about a 15 minute drive to the right address. I met the little guy it was intended for, and sure enough, they were birthday presents, which would not have arrived by the big day (#1) if the parents had waited a couple of days, and then requested redelivery.
In spite of the obvious scenario, that the label had come off my package and stuck to someone else’s, and my package was labelless on the truck, the Amazon tech I spoke to on the phone said there was no way to 1) contact the driver and say “Hey, take the unlabeled package to Rivkah’s address!” and refused to 2) request redelivery until I waited the official two days for the package not to show up, because sometimes they’re just slow like that. (I could tell he was reading from a script.)
FedEx once delivered me two futon chairs when I had ordered only one. I called the company (after checking my bank to make sure I’d been charged only once), and they were surprised. They had a record of only one. They said if I left the other one outside my door, they’d have FedEx pick it up in the morning. As I had no space for a second one, I was agreeable. FedEx picked it up at like 6:45am.
So the futon chair company cares, but the chair was a lot more expensive than some toddler toys and board books.
I would also just walk the package down a couple of houses, but there is something to be said for making the company feel a little pain and hopefully give their drivers incentive and time to make sure they are delivering to the correct address. I’m certain that the drivers are rated on speed much more than accuracy, and is going to lead to some number of misdeliveries.
Years ago, the grocery stores would sometimes do deliveries in these green plastic cartons which hold milk containers. We kept some around to keep stuff in, but I once noticed that they had printed on the side that these were the property of the milk company and no one had a right to keep them. They had a phone number to call to arrange a return if you had one, so I called them. I had thought they would send someone over to pick them up, but they told me instead to bring them back to the grocery store, which I wasn’t interested in doing and which defeated the whole purpose of having things delivered.
Question is: what are my legal responsibilities in such a situation? (As it happens, what I did was leave them full of stuff in my garage, where some of the surviving ones remain to this very day.)
You almost would’ve better off calling them and telling them you got your package and it’s filled with someone else’s stuff (and their receipt if it’s in there). You have the barcodes from your label, so you’ll be able to prove you got ‘your package’.
I gave up calling amazon when random stuff shows up. If it’s doesn’t have my name on it, that’s one thing, it’s just at the wrong house. But if my name is on the box, it’s really not worth spending 20 minutes on the phone trying to explain what happened just so they can tell say ‘maybe it was a gift from someone’ (sure, because some random friend decided to mail me a phone case for a phone I don’t have). I just keep it if I want it, toss it if I don’t.
It’s actually four large heavy packages, apparently all part of the same shipment. Not terribly convenient to schlep down the street. Would rather let FedEx do it.
You’re entitled to your beliefs, but the Federal Trade Commission (see link in OP) is crystal clear on this:
The FTC page makes no distinction regarding carrier.
Yes. Hoping to get a definitive statement on this, ideally with a cite to back it up.
Legally, I couldn’t tell you. I always assumed that’s more about other milk companies using them.
FWIW, when people ask me what they should do with all the milk crates in their garage, I tell them the same thing. If you don’t want to toss them, just look for a stack of them behind a grocery store and add them to it. The next time they get milk delivered, they’ll get picked up and I believe the milk companies will take care of getting them back to each other.
I have a similar one. At my work, most of our stuff comes in on pallets. The majority just being normal pallets. But we end up with one or two Chep pallets every day. You’ve probably seen them, if you see a stack of pallets, they’re the blue ones. Chep owns these pallets. In fact, a lot of businesses, mine included, get our pallets stolen on a pretty regular basis. Even the pallet thieves won’t steal these ones since they can’t sell them.
Now, that’s all well and good. I’m not really concerned about that part. My problem is that Chep has people that drive around looking for these pallets and take them back. For a while we just let them, until one day they damaged our property (backed up into one of our vehicles). We’ve since banned them from our property.
Here’s my question…when we catch people stealing pallets, we have them arrested. Can we have the Chep guy arrested? Is he stealing pallets? Just because they say “Property of Chep” on them, does that make it okay?
Luckily it hasn’t been an issue, they show up once a year or so and we shoo them off the property. But I’ve always been curious.
You could leave your neighbor a note that FedEx mis-delivered their packages to your address, and let them figure out how to get the items from your house to theirs.
You could even use the Nextdoor app to do this. I’ve seen these types of threads commonly there.
I want to push back against the OP’s cite, while at the same time having none of my own. That law was directed against people intentionally sending you stuff you didn’t order as some sort of “offer” which if you refused you should then send back.
People got tired of that and the powers that be prohibited the practice, basically saying that if someone sent you an item as an offer, you could keep it and they could pound sand.
I would be surprised (and again no cite) if a judge would side with you under this law because a carrier misdelivered a package intended for your neighbor. Perhaps someone not as lazy as me (hey, it’s a primary election day holiday in WV, courts are closed!) can cite to the actual regulation for a better answer. I simply don’t believe it’s a “the post office delivered to the wrong address, so it’s mine, I tells ya, mine” instead of a consumer protection law intended to prohibit companies from intentionally delivering items to your house and demanding you either pay or return them.
The FTC site is also crystal clear that they are discussing a slightly different situation:
That entire page, including the part you quote, are about how to handle merchandise that somebody sent to you without you ordering it.
However, in the case you’re discussing, nobody sent it to you. It was delivered to you by mistake, but the person/company who gave it to FedEx did not address it or send it to you, so the FTC’s page is inapplicable.
Depending on your state laws, keeping merchandise delivered by mistake can be a criminal act. For example, under Maine’s Criminal Code:
There is a reasonable effort standard under common law to return lost or mislaid property to a known owner. In this case, of course, the owner is known.
States may have specific statutes dealing with lost or mislaid property.
ETA:
Here is IL theft of lost or mislaid property statute for example:
I don’t know how it eventually played out, but if you look up “nick memmo”, you’ll find the case I alluded to earlier. A 86" TV was delivered to his house by mistake. He decided to keep it and was arrested and charged with larceny.
It may e legal, but is it moral? The package delivered to the wrong address happened to me once and the guy kept the item. As far as I’m concerned he stole 40 dollars from me.
I don’t think the OP is disagreeing with you. It is the basis for his question. Is he legally entitled to keep items mis-delivered to him? He is not relying on the FTC cite as an answer, he’s asking the teeming millions.
Please go back and reread my post, particularly the part from Joey P’s post that I quoted. He was talking about a situation in which a vendor shipped me goods I didn’t order, and suggested that I’d be required to return them; the FTC says no, regardless of whether it was a mistake or a sneaky attempt to con me out of additional cash.
Note also that my OP describes two independent incidents. The first incident happened a couple of months ago, and is of the above type. Per the FTC, I have no plans to return those items to the vendor. The second incident happened today, and involves misdelivery; this is the incident for which I’m here seeking legal advice regarding my obligation under the law.
Seems pretty clear, thanks. I get that this is for Maine, but it seems likely that similar laws apply in other states.
The section you have bolded is not in evidence. The FTC page that has been cited exists in a context, and that context is companies that attempt to make people feel obligated to pay for unordered merchandise. The fact that the FTC cite doesn’t explicitly disclaim delivery mistakes does not mean that its policies cover those. The FTC covers trade practices, not property law.
