Do you think the U.S. Post Office delivers to every address in the U.S.?

I just got back from my daily walk to the Post Office. Today I walked through temperatures in the teens to find one piece of junk mail in my box. The somewhat pointless exercise today got me to thinking: I bet many people in the U.S. think the U.S. Post Office delivers to every address in the U.S. Let me be the first to dispel this notion. Our Post Office does not deliver to every address. Some places, like our village, have no delivery. We have to pick up our mail at the Post Office. If I moved out into the country, then they would drive it out to my house for free, but not here in the village.

It's not a big problem, but it can be inconvenient. Take shipping packages, for example. If I order something and give the vendor our street address, then the Post Office will not deliver it. They will send it back, because our street address does not exist as far as the U.S. Postal Service is concerned. I can avoid this problem by using our Post Office Box number (eight, by the way; our address is P.O. Box 8 - one digit; how cool is that!). If I do use a P.O. Box, then UPS and FedEx won't deliver. I have to know in advance how the vendor intends to ship, or write a small essay on the order explaining that no, the U.S. Post Office does not deliver to every address and hope some semi-literate person in the shipping department actually cares.

The problem can be even more subtle. Some online retailers use the U.S. Post Office database of addresses to validate any address, even though they ship UPS or FedEx. This is a Catch 22. If I give them our P.O. Box, it gets kicked out because UPS and FedEx will not ship to a P.O. Box. If I give them our street address, that gets kicked out too, since the U.S. Post Office claims our street doesn't exist.

The worst problem is with some official government forms, where they insist you use a physical address and not a P.O. Box. That is a real problem. You can only hope the Post Office has mercy and decides to find your box. Normally they don't.

It does have its amusing aspects. I have my own zip+4 address. In other words, my nine digit zip code is just my local zip code plus my box number. For example, if my local zip code was 12345, then my nine digit zip is simply 12345-0008. If you knew my real zip code, you could mail a letter to me with only those nine digits.

Oh well. Maybe I should complain. I'm sure the handful of us in this situation constitute a formidable voting block.

Tom

 

I really wouldn't care if the Post Office would map our street addresses into P.O. Boxes. I other words, it's not the inconvenience that bothers me, it's the addressing confusion and Catch 22. It shouldn't be that hard for them to do. After all, the Post Office is perfectly capable of finding a house based on an address, so why can't they find my P.O. Box based on my street address. It's silly.

Tom

 

We used to work that way too, but automation has eliminated that possibility. If a letter or package can make it to our Post Office or UPS driver, it will get to the intended person. The problem is that most of the sorting occurs upstream at some large sorting center, and anything not "properly" addressed gets kicked out and sent home. For years my in-laws didn't know their street address. Their address was just their name, the street, and our village. I miss those days.

Tom

 

The term P.O. Box indicates that the box is at the Post Office, not a box in an apartment. As for being in an apartment, you still have a P.O. Box in our village.

We use descriptive addresses too. Many of the directions around here involve historical references, such as: "Drive west till you pass the old Wilson place, then take the two-track on the left." Never mind that the old Wilson place burned down 20 years ago. It's hard on new people and delivery men.

Tom

 

That doesn't work either. If you put a P.O. Box in the address, even on the second line, UPS and FedEx will refuse to take the package, so the online retailers will reject the address. Remember, too, that the street does not exist in the USPS database, so anyone using that database will consider it a bad address. Sometimes I can fake them out by putting Box 8 in the second line, and leaving out the P.O. designator.

Tom

 

Another one that works for letters is to use "P.O. Box ?", like this:

John Doe
P.O. Box ?
MyTown, MI 12345

That doesn't fix the delivery problems with orders, but it does get around not knowing someone's address. You can look up a street address in the phone book, but the Post Office will not give out P.O. Box numbers. At least in this little village, putting "P.O. Box ?" gets the letter to the local Post Office, and then the Postmaster (John) takes care of the rest. Btw, the UPS man is Dan and the FedEx guy is Jerry. We know them all on a first name basis. They put packages in my car when they see it parked in a spot that is more convenient than stopping at the house. One Christmas Eve Jerry the FedEx guy stopped and asked if he could leave a package for someone else. It was sent overnight to her store, but the store had closed at noon. He thought it must be a present or it wouldn't have been sent overnight, so he wondered if I would see her at the community Christmas tree that night. I thought I would, so I took the package and it worked out fine. We have a village tradition of meeting at the community Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and singing Christmas carols. It's nice.

Tom

 

I remember those twice a day mail deliveries. I also remember when first class postage was 5 cents (makes us sound like old farts, which of course we are, but I'm not ready to admit it).

Apparently our lack of local delivery stems from a USPS rule that prohibits a post office from delivering to addresses within 1/8th of a mile of the post office unless the address is on the normal path of a mail carrier. In other words, you can have your mail delivered if you live farther than 1/8th of mile away from the post office OR if a mail carrier passes by your house anyway. The Postmaster of a post office is prohibited from gerrymandering the delivery routes to cover addresses not otherwise eligible for home delivery.

It's a simple rule, and it makes sense, but it doesn't solve the confusion with addressing. The addressing problem is what bothers me. I wish there was a way I could map my street address into our P.O. Box, so we didn't have to use the P.O. Box address when ordering.

Tom