My brother lives on “Lakeview Avenue,” which is essentially his unpaved driveway. Not far from him is Huntington Boulevard, which at least has gravel put down. They both show up on Google Maps, but I doubt it’s an official designation.
I would think that would be counterproductive. The address gives prospective customers no clue about where to go to reach the store’'s physical location, thus militating against walk-in business.
These addresses will show up in any GPS I have used. The only reason it is sometimes a “problem” is that a new Walmart might be put up directly off an already existing road - and if you have an in car DVD type GPS - it might not show up cause it is new. So someone might think that the address isn’t there, but it is just new.
At least that is my experience - most of which is in one/two states.
ETA - oops - I accidentally edited your quote (I think) - I wasn’t in anyway intended to change the meaning of it - I think I changed a punctuation mark thinking it was mine. Sorry
I don’t know about Walmarts, but I can tell you that none of the hospitals in my area* have “personalized” addresses. They all have regular addresses that anyone familiar with the area could find (because the hundred block lines up correctly), even if they just needed to be pointed in the general direction.
But that could be a regional thing, like I said, I know (well, I think) some business in my area do it.
*Off the top of my head I can think of the address for hospitals in 5(?) counties.
Even back in the '80s, emergency dispatch in LA was able to recognize “Nakatomi Plaza” as an address, and send a police car around to check out reports of a disturbance.
Oh, sorry about that. I keep forgetting that I live in a world in which everybody but me has a GPS.
If you looked up the address of a WalMart or a hospital and it said 1 [business name] Way would you really say ‘oh well, don’t know where that is, guess I’ll go somewhere else’? I’d think most (many? some?) would just, at least if they were on a computer, copy the address to mapwebsite and see what it comes up with or just click the directions button that’s usually right next to the address.
I found 1 Legends Way and it’s about a thousand miles from me. It shouldn’t be to hard to find the Walmart in my city.
Granted, I’ll give you, if I’m in a hurry and I look at my phone and the address is 1 Walmart Way, that’s kind of annoying (instead of, say 6200 S Howell Ave), but it’s usually just a matter of clicking on it and when the map pops up and can see that it’s near Howell and College and off I go.
The Girl Scouts of Northeast Ohio moved in down the street from me, into a building that already existed. The city named the little tiny 100ft street that led to their driveway “Girl Scout Way” so they could be at 1 Girl Scout Way.
Many years later someone developed the land behind the GS building with houses and extended that 100ft road and was all “We really don’t want our residents living on Girl Scout Way.” So the city switched the name back to what it used to be - I guess S. Park Drive.
But the Girl Scouts are still at 1 Girl Scout Way. The Post Office has it figured out.
The hospital I work at is at 1 Hospital Drive. But then they’re a little full of themselves in my opinion.
This might be perfectly OK. Buildings on a corner can usually claim an address on either street. Near me is an ordinary house that was divided up into 2 apartments. It’s on a corner, and you can tell by the two very different numbers that the units have addresses on different streets. (One of the entrances is a side door that opens onto the driveway, and more directly faces the cross street.)
Street addresses are determined by the addresses of the plots of land the building is on in what are called “plat books.” If you own three plots you can address your building for any one of the three. If you own plots on a corner you can usually use either street in your name. A lot of buildings in NYC use this trick to get an address on the tonier street.
I used to hate vanity addresses in the days before GPS. Try to find one in a strange city.
In a lot of cities, and I suspect most, you can’t use “one” as an address, because all street numbers have to conform to a block grid. For example, a short street leading off 43rd street has to have a 4300 block address. The only way your house number can be 1 is if you are at the corner of one of the streets that demarcates the separation between north/south or east/west street numbers.
In recent years, the Post Office has taken this authority away from the city. In some states more so than others. In Wisconsin, if you are not within city limites, your number is going to be something like 5408N 7166W Jones Road, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.
Yes, there are lots of companies that do have 1 as a number, but I suspect they had to do a lot of wheeling and dealing at city hall, to get a privilege that is not accessible to the ordinary firm.
I wonder about that in the case of Nike HQ. Nike has a big campus with over 20 buildings on it. But the address for all of them is 1 SW Bowerman Drive. Now this campus is close enough to the N-S divide for that area that it might be a legitimate address if the street were oriented N-S. But the main driveway is closer to E-W. It should be numbered somewhere around 15000.
I remember once asking someone there what his work address was and getting 1 Bowerman Dr. My reaction was “huh?”. That address a pretty useless fact; you need the name of the building. Is it the Michael Jordan building, the Nolan Ryan building, the Mia Hamm building, or any of about 20 other athletes?
I believe you’ll find that’s the county’s system—though Lyman schemes with two coördinates are pretty rare—and USPS had nothing to do with it. Nearly all counties in the US have gone to a “city-style” addressing scheme during the past two decades, to allow enhanced 911 service. The old “Rural Route 3, Box 404B” schemes that the Postal Service applied have gone into the dustbin of history.
Recently, the Minnesota Vikings tried to get one block of the street that goes in front of the new stadium renamed to “Vikings Way”. (Possibly because they didn’t to be near Chicago [Bears] Avenue.) There was a lot of public protest, and when a city official asked how much the team was willing to offer for the ‘naming rights’, they promptly withdrew the request.
Here’s a different kind of fake address: The company that contracts to run the cafeteria in my workplace is Sodexo. I’ve been told it’s one of the four big companies that run the majority of all work and school cafeterias that are contracted out in the U.S. (and maybe in much of the world). Their headquarters are actually in France.
When you pay for your meal by credit card, they run the card and give you a receipt, as do most places. Companies have to give the credit card companies their information so that the name of the company and its address and its telephone number will appear on the receipt and thus you’ll know where you spent your money. What appears on the receipt in our cafeteria is “Sodexo, 9999 Company Rd, Anytown, AA 45454, (555) 555-6969”. This is thus not only a fake address but a ridiculous one that anyone could recognize as a fake address.
That Zip is in Dayton, Ohio. There’s your first clue.
I’m aware that the zip code is in Dayton. It has nothing to do with the actual address of Sodexo, just like the rest of the address, since Sodexo is based in France. These people knew enough to put 555 in for the first three numbers of the seven-digit phone number, since that always indicates a fake number. They had to put something down for the zip code, but there’s no standard fake zip code, so they just put down something at random, I guess.
Well, the the more relevant point was that the religious press used the address so they wouldn’t be at 666 Fifth Avenue.
Actually, the subsidiary which services you is not based in France: their owning company is. Sodexo Inc is based in Maryland. Different legal entities.
That address is supposed to print the actual location and in many cases it does, but for some reason your cafeteria hasn’t updated the generic. It’s a local problem, not Sodexo policy.