Background:

Certain types of apartment / home arrangements are rare in the United States (e.g. courtyard apartments or a second “back” unit behind a front house).

Such residences are often not directly visible from the road, and accessing them may require going through a gate.

They may also have addresses that include fractions or letters, which is not generally expected in U.S. addresses.

The Issue:

Residents at these addresses will occasionally encounter problems when ordering things online.

Not only will web sites occasionally balk at a fractional address (perhaps mangling “1121 ½” into “112112”), but delivery drivers also might be perplexed as to how to deal with unusual addresses like “136A” or “979 Floor 2.”

This is particularly a problem for “sharing economy” contract workers (in 2023, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, etc.).

Since contract workers don’t handle the same route over and over (unlike “normal” mail delivery),  they don’t naturally become familiar with the weird addresses in an area.

Proposal:

Let’s hook up the app-ordering system to an app-controlled light that the food-ordering resident will then stick in their window.

As soon as the resident has ordered (say) a pizza, a pizza-shaped light would turn on in the window. This way, the delivery driver would instantly know that they have the right house.

The light could also be a screen that could display an order number (Figure 2). This would reduce the chance of confusion if two neighboring houses ordered pizza at the same time. controlled by the food-ordering app.

Conclusion:

This situation should work well! Plus, even if the window is not immediately visible from the street, the delivery driver will know to investigate until they’ve found the sign, rather than having to try a bunch of wrong addresses.

PROS: Should speed up the delivery process and make the job slightly less annoying.

CONS: May encourage people to eat delivery pizza for every meal, which could have negative national health consequences.