My daughter bought a condo about a year ago.
The mail boxes are in the common area of the lobby.
Recently there was a sloppily written note on the bulletin board: 'My name is Jill, I am the new mail carrier. From now on you are to have your name on your mail box. NO NAME, NO MAIL!"
Jill needs a lesson in penmanship and a lesson in you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I don’t see the big deal. the door intercoms are 10 feet away with everyones names on them It’s not like someone can’t find out who lives in which unit.
I think just the tone and scrawled mess of the note pissed everyone off. Nobody has put their name on any of the boxes.
So, can the mail carrier refuse to deliver mail for that fact alone? I Googled in and came up with a mulitude of answers but nothing official.
Seems wrong that she can, but she still might. You or your daughter should be contacting someome higher up at the PO, otherwise your daughter may not get her mail.
Not me. I have no dog in this fight. I would probably just put a return address sticker on the box and be done with it. Everyones names are on the door P.A. buttons anyay across the room.
But the note was a mess and shitty sounding.
In a multi-tenant building the tenants change somewhat frequently, and often mail isn’t properly addressed with the unit number. Sure that’s fairly rare, but it happens often enough, especially from a mail carrier’s perspective. Also, if I were delivering a large bulk of mail that needed to be sorted into individual boxes, it seems easier/faster/more efficient to quickly scan the name at the top of the address and match that with the name on a mailbox as opposed to matching a unit number in the middle of the address, probably formatted several different ways, with the number on the box. The initial sorting at the post office or in the truck likely put everything in the right order, but the carrier still has to find the break between John Smith Unit 5 and Jane Doe Apt #6. It’s a way to quickly verify the correct destination. Look at the door buzzer across the room? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Questionably addressed mail is just going to end up in a pile on top of the mailbox in that case.
Except the OP said it’s a condo building so it’s more likely to be owners living in each unit and I don’t expect those to change as frequently as in a rental building.
Just as anecdotal evidence, everyone in my suburban neighborhood has house numbers mounted on the fronts of their houses in big numerals, easy to see from the street for a pizza delivery. No one (at least no one in my immediate area) has their name anywhere in evidence. We all still get mail delivered. Too often it’s delivered incorrectly, but that’s a different issue.
On the basis of that, I would assume it’s not an official USPS requirement for everyone. But then again, there might be a reason for it to be different when you have a bank of mailboxes like that.
And I won’t go into an off-topic rant, but from experience, I’m doubtful that having names on the boxes will enhance the accuracy of delivery.
I live in a big apartment building. The mailboxes are a big wall of identical lockboxes. The boxes do not have names on them, just arbitrary numbers from 1 to whatever. Which numbers do not correspond to the unit numbers of our apartments. BUT we give out our address as “123 Main Street Apt 345, Anytown FL 12345” using our actual apartment number which is nowhere on the outside of our box.
How does the mail carrier solve this conundrum and put the right mail in the right anonymous box? There’s a big label inside each box with the apartment number and current resident’s name. When they open the whole bank of boxes for filling all the labels are easy for them to see.
This system is not unusual. The previous place I lived had the exact same arrangement. Totally anonymous boxes on the outside, names and unit numbers inside.
Meanwhile, back at the OP’s daughter’s place …
Sounds like time for the condo property manager to talk nicely to the local USPS manager about what it takes to satisfy USPS regulations and the practicalities of mail delivery to banks of mail boxes. And to give Jill a chill pill.
I will suggest, from years of living in buildings, that misdelivery into the wrong box is a lot more likely if they’re reading Apt 3 versus Apt 8 on the mailpiece and matching that to the box number. OTOH, If they’re reading Smith vs Jones off the same mailpiece, that’s a lot hard to misread. Mail carriers are under very heavy time pressure; too much work and not enough time. Gotta work fast.
So basically the carrier is doing tenants a favour - attempting to deliver mail that does not have the (correct) apartment number when she could just take it back and stamp it undeliverable.
Her tone leaves much to be desired, and it should not be a problem to simply deliver by unit number if the address contains that. I have to wonder what brought this on - has someone given out an address without the apartment, or with an incorrect one (or a correspsondent has the wrong apartment nummber and fails to correct it?) Or has someone given her a hard time about misdirected mail, or misaddressed “mail piled on top of the boxes”? “You know I’m Mr Smith in 3B, why do you just leave Mr Smith mail without the 3B on top of the mailboxes instead of in my box?” Somehow I don’t think a new carrier gets to learn all the names on the route. Maybe the previous carrier knew Mr. Smith and put the mail in his box. So now he’s annoyed that mail from people who can’t get his address right is not going into his box any more…
Most of our employees have direct deposit but there was a time when all checks were mailed. The mailman that delivered to our office said that they won’t deliver checks to an apartment mailbox if the name on the check and the name on the mailbox don’t match or if there isn’t a name at all on the mailbox.
My neighborhood has common mailboxes and we were told this too by the mail carrier so we put everyone in the household’s last name taped to the bottom of our box. And of course every month we get some neighbor’s mail who strangely enough never shares a last name with us.
We have a community box out on the street for the dozen or so homes. None of of the boxes have names/addresses on the outside. Each box has a number from one to 12, and the numbers have nothing to do with our actual street addresses.
However, when the postal employee opens the box to deliver the mail, there are the actual names and addresses INSIDE THE BOX that only the postal employee can see.
Perhaps, but I suspect the turnover in a 40-unit condo is probably similar if not higher than in a 10-unit apartment. In either case it’s the number of units that really matters, especially when they’re only represented by a faceless bank of mailboxes.
But at worst it would only be neutral, and since it can help it’s likely that it will.
Mail carriers also turn over a lot more than they used to, so yeah there’s more opportunities for mis-addressed mail to just go in the pile, whatever pile that may be. Also, without names on the mailboxes Mr. Smith’s unit 3B mail may just as well end up in Mrs. Jones’ unit 38 mailbox. Or Mr. Roberts’ unit 41 mail ends up in Ms. Baker’s unit 4L box.
Now that’s an interesting one. I’d say that’s a reasonable policy, and your local postmaster would be able to weigh in on that.
Probably she got fed up with poorly addressed mail. Yeah it’s not very professional, but they’re also being overworked and constantly disrespected by the powers that be. We got the “No Name No Mail!” notes a couple years ago. My apartment is broken into 4 separate entrances with 8 units each, and a bank of 8 mailboxes in each entry. So any mail without an apartment number would be very difficult to locate since the door buzzers don’t have our names on them. They did put stickers on the mailboxes that say “Correct Name = Correct Mail”, which is less snarky.
I’ve lived at my current address since 2012. Names are inside the mailboxes (apartment complex cluster). I am STILL getting mail addressed to previous occupants.
Not sold on name labels on the exterior of the box to help stalkers or thieves more easily find their targets really improving delivery accuracy.
As a retired letter carrier, I have a couple of points:
First, carriers are under a LOT of time pressure. Figuring out where to put a letter with an incomplete address takes time. The days when you could mail something addressed to Uncle Moose and Aunt Pansy, Pittsburgh are over.
The way the Postal Service is now staffed you may not have the same carrier every day. You may have a string of part time casuals delivering your mail. They need all the help they can get to get it right. Having all the pertinent information on the boxes is a big help.
In the apartment/condo units I delivered with a bank of boxes they were serviced from a mail room behind the boxes. Any information would not be visible to the public.
That’s probably not going to be an issue because a building that has a unit 3B won’t also have a unit 38. Usually , buildings have some sort of convention for apartments. In a small building, you might have Floor Number followed by L(eft), R(ight), F(ront) or R(ear) or simply #1,2 , 3, etc. if there is one unit per floor. Larger buildings might have all numbers, possibly with apartment 1025 being on the 10th floor and so on) or they might use floor number plus apartment number resulting in 14B. All different ways to do it - but there’s always one system per building.
Now to the OP - the carrier should have been more polite in the note, but I also think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect the carrier to walk 10 feet to the door intercoms to figure out where mail without a unit number should go , when it’s unknown how much mail shows up without a unit number. It might be rare, but if it’s a small building it might be very common. Also, it’s not unheard of for the intercom to have only one name ( or even no name) while people with multiple names get mail addressed to that apartment. And people will get made at the carrier either way - some will get mad if the carrier doe not deliver mail addressed to Jones if they know Smith lives in that apartment and others get made when the carrier delivers mail addressed to people who don’t live there , whether it’s a previous occupant or just a misaddressed piece of mail.
I’ll admit that I’m ready to dump on the USPS given the opportunity. In my defense, I’ve had enough bad experiences with them, quality-of-service-wise, to explain why I’m so cynical about the whole thing. But perhaps the talent pool for carriers is particularly shallow in my area. I dunno.