We underestimate the needs for labeling things correctly. Some 9 out of 10 consumers believe there will always be a need for printed materials. This is especially true in the age of online ordering and physical shipping to physical addresses.
Speaking of addresses, a 58-year-old woman in Austria was expecting a shipment of dresses to her home. Her husband and she received the shipment, but only half-correct. The first box had her dresses, but the second box did not. They were packages of pink-purple pebbles that she thought were decorative stones, like the kind you put in planters or fish tanks.
Decorative stones they were not. Rather, the couple had received mistakenly received a shipment of 24,800 ecstasy pills. The husband, 59, was the one that gave the “decorative stones” a second look and determined they were probably drugs. The police were promptly contacted and the package was handed over.
“The originally planned cozy breakfast was quickly over and to the horror of the couple, it turned out that, though one of the packages did contain the two dresses, the second however had 24,800 Ecstasy tablets worth about 500,000 Euros. The (post) office was equally astonished, which is why the police, and subsequently the narcotics department of the City Police Command Linz, was informed,” Upper Austria police said in a statement.
In the United States, there were 662,390 police officers patrolling in 2017, searching for similar things. The Netherlands — much smaller than the United States — is known as one of the world’s biggest producers of drugs. They’ve reported that the quantity of drugs being sent via mail has tripled from 2016 to 2018. The package itself was meant to be shipped to Scotland and the investigation now involves The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA), bringing police forces across the European Union into the mix.
In the same statement, Upper Austria police reported that the NCA was able to investigate and detain the person the package was meant for. A little more difficult, but of great interest to Dutch authorities, is the origin of such a substantial shipment of illegal drugs.
At least the woman got her dresses.
