With the holiday just around the corner, gifts are being delivered throughout the country. And one man found a way to keep the package-thieves away.
Jaireme Barrow, 34, showed Tacoma, Washington police surveillance video of these thieves clearly stealing his packages, The Washington Post reported. Barrow believed the delivery was Jeep parts and electronics he had ordered. The robbers were never arrested.
So Barrow took matters into his own hands.
“I was thinking, how could I scare them and make them drop my package and then never come to my front porch again,” Barrow told The Washington Post. “And I thought, ‘Getting shot at is scary. That’ll make them think twice.’”
Barrow created TheBlankBox. The concept is for a thief to lift a dummy package which would trigger a 12-gauge shotgun blank to go off and evidence of it working is on YouTube.
Barrow said that TheBlankBox is very loud but technically harmless.
“The very first guy I did it to, he was so scared he dropped his cellphone in my front yard,” Barrow told The Washington Post. “I gave it to the cops. Turns out, he lived, like, three blocks away from me.”
Barrow has toyed with his device for nearly a year, but the invention is more important now than ever before.
In 2016, about 1.61 billion people worldwide made purchases online, equating to 1.9 trillion dollars. By 2020, it is projected to reach 4.06 trillion dollars.
And, according to the National Retail Federation, 58 million Americans shopped only online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. That is seven million more people than those that showed exclusively in stores.
Barrow is selling his invention to the public now too. TheBlankBox can be purchased here. The cheapest version costs $60.
TheBlankBox is one way to make a bang this holiday!