Every carrier thinks they are buying a box. They are actually signing a ten-year commitment to a software stack, a maintenance model, and a spare-parts supply chain, and most of the regret is baked in at procurement, before a single parcel moves. Each manufacturer takes five minutes to say what the RFP never asks: where buyers overpay, where they lock themselves in, and what separates a serious tender from a naive one. The discussion then covers total cost of ownership, buy versus lease versus Locker-as-a-Service, and whether open standards are real protection or just a line on the spec sheet.