The University of Connecticut will add two Amazon delivery lockers to its Storrs campus this week, according to Associate Director of Logistics Andy Kelly.
The lockers, owned and operated by Amazon, will be located outside of Watson Residence Hall under the breezeway, and outside of Putman Dining Hall, near Garrigus, Werth, Hale and Ellsworth Residence Halls. The outdoor locations prevent any issues with card access, Kelly said.
According to Emily Cooperman, an account manager with Amazon, the lockers will be installed on Wednesday and should be activated and ready for orders by the end of the week.
Once activated, the lockers will show up as a delivery option for Amazon orders, Kelly said. The lockers will allow students to bypass campus mail services and get same-day or next-day delivery, something that is virtually impossible as of now, even with the recent addition of university-run self-service lockers.
“We track the packages. We take them to the mail room. Depending on if they’re in part of campus where we have our own lockers, you know, they might have access to it sooner than if it goes to a traditional mail room,” Kelly said. “And obviously, those mail rooms are constrained by the hours that we’re open, which is significantly less than the access where we have lockers. And so [the Amazon lockers] will provide a solution to that problem.”
Currently, UConn Mail Services operates its own lockers in Connecticut Hall, which covers South Campus and Alumni Quad; Shippee Hall, for Shippee, Buckley, Whitney, Holcomb, Sprague, Hicks and Grange residents; and Hilltop Apartments, Kelly said. Mail Services is in the process of finding funding for five more university-run locker sites. Kelly said that the end goal is to service all residential areas with lockers rather than an actual mailroom.
With the lockers, “the access to get your packages is by far, immensely better, and that’s what we’re going for,” he said.
Kelly hopes the Amazon lockers will take a lot of packages off of Mail Services’ plate.
“We have times where we’re a day or two behind, and that doesn’t meet the expectation of our customer base, the residential students on campus,” he said.
Kelly said that Mail Services doesn’t have the resources to deal with the influx of packages at their peak times — the beginning of the fall semester, for example.
Since a lot of the packages Mail Services receives are from Amazon, Kelly hopes the lockers will “drop that peak a little bit,” and give them a better chance at getting packages to students in a timely manner.
“We think it’s a reasonable expectation for folks living on campus to get their packages as soon as they get to the university,” Kelly said.