No, I haven’t turned into a locker fan, but this is the first article from a locker operator who concedes that to be an operational advantage for the carriers, a locker must be of a certain size.
In this case a minimum of 70 compartments but the company, Foxpost has an average of 130 compartments per locker.

As Adam Bengyel CEO of FOXPOST PLC states, a locker network where the lockers only have 10 compartments will mean a lot of driving as the drop rate is very low. This will seriously impact the financials and the possible sustainability impact of the locker network.

IMHO it also proves that the “number of lockers per 10,000 inhabitants” is invalid as a unit of measure when looking at market coverage. It is the number of compartments which show market coverage. Even better would be taking the number of compartments against the daily parcel volume in a market.

My suggestion would be to use the number of compartments as a percentage of the daily parcel volumes i.e., if 900,000 compartment are available, with 10 million parcels per day, the locker factor would be 9%.

Even better would be to take the dwell factor into consideration as well. Should the dwell time be that 40% leave their parcels for longer than 24h, the locker factor could be expressed as 9/60, meaning 9% total coverage, with 60% of that coverage being physical available.

For the individual carrier this can be a tricky calculation. Non-agnostic lockers are easy to calculate, but with agnostic lockers the individual carrier would only be able to use (in theory) the number of compartments per locker which corresponds with the carrier’s market share. So, if a carrier has 12% market share and the lockers on average 85 compartments, the calculation would be 9/60 and of those 60 only 12% i.e., 6,12 compartments would be available on average daily per locker location. (60% of 85 compartments = 51 compartment and of those 12% = 6,12 compartments.)(Dwell time is tracked by Parcel Monitor Community)

Theoretical usage is based on returns from other carriers not blocking even more compartments and will probably also depend on the time one arrives at the locker. The carrier which arrives first will have more compartments available, and whoever comes last could be facing a full locker.
An agnostic locker with 17 compartments, a trend we are seeing in some markets, would give a drop rate of just 1,22 parcels per stop in this case. That is equal to a normal urban stop.

This leads to the conclusion that agnostic lockers must be (far) bigger on average than non-agnostic lockers if the carriers are to get a higher drop rate than a normal urban stop.

Would be nice if the Last Mile Experts would consider using this unit of measure in their yearly #OOH report.

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Check this Article on postandparcel.info:
„The Key to your Lockers“
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