The out-of-home delivery market is not waiting for incumbents to catch up. New entrants are moving fast, customer expectations are shifting, and the companies that built their businesses on traditional models are facing a straight choice: adapt or become irrelevant.

Jacek Powalka, OOH Solutions Director at Modern Expo, does not mince his words. In a market this competitive, you are either predator or prey. There is no middle ground. And if you want to see what the future looks like, he says, stop trying to predict it. Just go to Poland.

Poland’s out-of-home market is already running seven profitable networks with locker utilisation above 40%. The lesson is not about physical locations. It is about adoption. The operators winning are the ones who have made themselves virtually available at checkout across the broadest range of merchants and marketplaces, not just the ones with the most lockers on the street.

Three things will define the winners over the next fifteen years. Customer adoption built through deep collaboration with senders and merchants. Network consolidation: cities cannot sustain competing locker networks indefinitely and regulation will eventually force shared infrastructure the way it did with trains and telecoms. And software efficiency. InPost’s average drop-off time is twelve seconds per parcel, enabling couriers to handle up to 1,600 deliveries a day. That kind of performance is only possible at a software level, and it is where the real competitive advantage will be built.

But underlying all of it is one thing: relevance. Not just physical proximity, not just a loyalty scheme, not just a mobile app. Genuine relevance to the communities and customers you serve, built around services people actually use. Jacek’s provocation is worth sitting with: stop calling them parcel lockers. Start thinking of them as smart city logistics hubs.

Watch the video. Then maybe book a flight to Warsaw.