Amazon officially announces Hub, its package delivery lockers, and says over 500,000 have access to them as more roll out across US
Amazon on Tuesday talked up some of the early successes of its new delivery lockers for apartments, called Hub. — The e-commerce giant last July launched the program …
Context & Ripple Effects
Hub is the locker leg of a two-pronged push at Amazon's last hundred feet. The other prong is Key: the $250 camera-and-smart-lock bundle that lets couriers open your front door, built on partnerships with smartlock maker August and garage-access startup Garageio (reported back in 2016). Where Key puts Amazon inside the home, Hub keeps packages outside it — a bank of lockers in the building's lobby or mailroom.
The official announcement, with over 500,000 people already having access since the program quietly started last July, matters because it turns an experiment into standard apartment infrastructure — and because rivals read it as a land grab for the building itself.
First-order effects
- Apartment dwellers get a secure pickup point that removes porch theft and missed deliveries, and landlords gain an amenity Amazon installs and maintains at no stated cost to them.
Second-order effects
- UPS answered within a month by testing its own building-level delivery program in New York using locks from startup Latch (the UPS-Latch pilot) — competing for the same landlord relationships but working with the building rather than individual units.
Third-order effects
- Amazon is embedding physical infrastructure inside residential buildings, a strategy it later scaled from lobby lockers to a reported plan for roughly 1,000 small urban delivery hubs (the hub-network report) — making the retailer, not the carrier or the landlord, the default owner of the final handoff.
The trend: Last-mile delivery is consolidating around whoever controls access to the building, with Amazon pairing in-home keys (Key) and lobby lockers (Hub) to own both ends of the handoff.