SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — A Scottsdale couple came to the rescue, helping dozens of locals recover their Amazon packages after they were found dumped on the side of the road.
Ned Blum and his wife were walking their dog on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago when they saw something that didn’t look quite right.
“Just very surprised,” he said. “My wife looked over off the main road into the desert and saw a bunch of boxes… made a comment about who would just throw garbage on the side of the road…"
But when they got closer, they realized it wasn’t what they thought.
“There were multiple Amazon packages just dumped on the side of the road, unopened… ended up being about 25 or 30 of them,” said Blum.
More than two dozen Amazon boxes were left on the side of the road and there was no delivery truck in sight. How they got there was a complete mystery.
“Somehow, they fell out of the truck or something,” he said. “But they were pretty much too far off the road, they were definitely planted there I would say, instead of just falling out of a trunk.”
All the boxes were addressed to the same apartment complex with different unit numbers about a mile away.
“Yeah, and all different sizes in large boxes, small boxes, envelopes,” said Blum.
So, they decided to take action.
“I went back to our house to get our car and we loaded them all up in the trunk and we drove to the complex,” he said.
They couldn’t find a main office, but they did find a resident who was nice enough to store the boxes in her garage and then post about it in a neighborhood portal, so they could find the rightful owners.
“Within a day or two, she said they had all been picked up by all the residents,” said Blum.
Ned and his wife were just glad they could be part of the solution.
“It did feel good,” he said. “We actually even called Amazon to try to report it. Kind of had some difficulty communicating what had happened... we gave them some of the tracking numbers of the boxes that we found.”
So for now, how, when or why the boxes were ditched remains a mystery, but at least the owners got their deliveries in time for the holidays, leaving Ned and his wife getting a lot of positive feedback on a neighborhood app.
“It got hundreds of comments and likes and things like that,” he said. “Just random, if my wife wouldn’t have looked over right at that time or we would’ve been distracted elsewhere, we never would have seen them.”
12 News reached out to Amazon to try to get to the bottom of what actually happened, but we have not yet heard back.
Amazon customers are directed to contact the company within 30 days of expected delivery if their missing package shows as delivered but hasn’t arrived, according to Amazon’s website. The company says it will do everything it can to help.
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