My Building Needs a Loading Dock

Matthew Elefant is a husband, father of three, and 20-year resident of the Upper West Side who spends much of his free time in Central Park with his family.

My building has a doorman.

He is a good man. He knows everyone’s name. He knows which tenants want conversation and which tenants want silence. He knows whose grandchildren are visiting, whose dog got sick, and which elevator makes the strange noise that nobody can quite describe correctly.

When I moved to New York thirty years ago, a doorman’s job seemed relatively straightforward. He greeted people. He signed for the occasional package. He opened doors. He kept an eye on things.

Then online shopping happened.

Now my building lobby looks less like the entrance to an apartment building and more like the receiving department of a mid-sized distribution center.

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The packages arrive all day.

Boxes from Amazon. Boxes from Target. Boxes containing vitamins, batteries, phone chargers, dog treats, the second phone charger because you hit Add to Cart too fast, and items that seemed absolutely essential at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night and slightly confusing forty-eight hours later.

The strange thing is that nobody really talks about this.

We discuss housing shortages. We discuss traffic. We discuss congestion pricing. Meanwhile, an enormous transformation has quietly taken place inside apartment buildings all over the city.

Residential buildings were designed for people.

Increasingly, they are being asked to function as logistics hubs.

The lobby became a loading zone.

The doorman became a warehouse attendant.

And the residents became part of the supply chain.

I am not anti-online shopping.

I order things constantly.

A specific brand of socks that I have developed an unreasonable attachment to. Specialty products that would have taken an entire Saturday to locate twenty years ago now appear on my doorstep after a few keystrokes and a moment of weak financial judgment.

This is objectively useful.

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Here is the thing about online shopping that the algorithms have figured out and the rest of us are still catching up to.

Anything can look good in a video.

A mediocre cutting board, filmed correctly and paired with the right music, can make you feel like your entire kitchen situation is about to change. In a store, you would have picked it up, looked at it under actual light, and put it back in thirty seconds.

Instead, it is now sitting in your living room waiting to be reboxed and returned.

The story we tell ourselves is that online shopping saves time.

What it really did was redistribute it.

My living room has become a receiving area.

But it is also a shipping area.

Both directions. All the time.

When I was sixteen, I had an after-school job as a stock boy.

And now, after a long career, I have found myself doing much of that work again, only now I do it in my apartment.

I receive inventory.

I inspect inventory.

I am told which products go into circulation and which products will be returned to the manufacturer.

I reseal cartons.

I transport goods to approved processing facilities.

All this just to return a sweater.

Who knew that working at the Rockaway Mall would turn out to be a transferable skill in my fifties?

Then there was the time my wife gave me a promotion: Director of Printing Return Labels.

I accepted the responsibility with confidence.

In retrospect, the confidence was the problem.

Modern shipping labels bear almost no resemblance to the mailing addresses I learned in first grade.

Name. Street. City. State. Zip.

That was the system.

I understood that system.

What I was handed was a QR code.

So I accidentally sent the Zappos return to J. Crew and the J. Crew return to Zappos.

Double mistake.

I contacted both companies.

I was transferred to a chatbot that found my problem so unique that it transferred me to another chatbot.

It gave me a case number.

The case numbers felt encouraging.

Like lottery tickets feel encouraging.

I’m still waiting for my return to pay out.

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Online shopping solved genuine problems. It expanded access. It made obscure products available to anyone with an internet connection. It saved time in ways that are undeniably valuable.

But every technological convenience reshapes the world around it.

The stores changed.

The neighborhoods changed.

The buildings changed.

The jobs changed.

And somewhere along the way, we quietly accepted that our homes would become part of an enormous logistics network operating twenty-four hours a day.

My building needs a loading dock.

The funny thing is that I am only half joking.

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