Addresses don’t even need to include a street name at all. So far as I know, the full, official address for Montana State University, for instance, is
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717
Or, more likely, you’re looking for one particular department, or one particular person in one particular department. There’s still no indication of which building, or any other physical location: It’d just be
Dr. Yves Idzerda
Department of Physics
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717
Notably missing from that address is any mention of W. Garfield St. or S. 9th Ave. (which, if they intersected, would intersect at the administrative offices at the center of campus), nor of the EPS building (where the physics department is), nor of W. Grant St. or S. 6th Ave. (where the EPS building is).
And of course, that sort of thing can also happen in practice, even if it isn’t official. For instance, the Terminal Tower, the most distinctive building in Cleveland, is officially located at 1 Public Square (a designation which does make sense, and which is already pretty distinctive). But a business with its office in that building is just as likely to list their address as just Suite ####, Terminal Tower.
So this thread isn’t about the time Marge made up an address to give Chief Wiggums, which turned out to be an actual building where Bart was hiding fireworks?
It is fairly common here in Maine, especially in small towns, for the Hannaford Supermarket to be on Hannaford Drive. Some times they are in plazas, and the road to the plaza is Hannaford Drive.
> Actually, the subsidiary which services you is not based in France: their owning
> company is. Sodexo Inc is based in Maryland. Different legal entities.
What point are you making? Sodexo is the sole owner of the subsidiary. Sodexo’s business worldwide is running food services and doing facilities management. It’s not like Sodexo is some corporation that owns but completely ignores a subsidiary that does work that’s wildly different from the overall corporation. Yes, Sodexo has a U.S. office through which they handle their U.S. operations, but presumably they pass orders down through the U.S. office to the local cafeterias and such:
Mississippi State University’s ZIP is just for the university… 39762. They have their own USPS office on campus. I believe the official address is Mississippi State, MS (as opposed to Starkville, MS).
I think what you have there is simply that the POS terminal maintainer didn’t finish the proper programming to substitute the actual address for a placeholder. He may not have known or had at hand the proper address and phone number, just the ZIP Code. Not a situation requiring Interpol involvement.
That there are a lot of decisions which do not come from France. Heck, I could point out but don’t want to give myself a bad stomach at this time of day things Sodexo did outside of the US which evidently came from the US. I don’t know what kind of company you work for, but most of the companies I’m familiar with do not work on a purely top-down model, and in fact the issues linked with being in different legal demarcations are one of the reasons where “local” management needs more leeway. Decisions such as what software to use for different functions may be taken on a corporate level or lower, and updating that address was definitely not a task Sodexo France should have done, it’s local.
I work for the U.S. government. Everything we do is ultimately determined by decisions of the President and the Congress. They let us handle the details, of course, but we have to follow their overall instructions. I think we’re all agreed that the bad set-up of the credit card machine in my workplace cafeteria was a local screw-up.
In Exeter, England, the postal authorities stopped a business owner from giving has address as 123, Fore Street on the grounds that it was in the middle of the street and the number didn’t fit, so it would confuse people looking for the address.
I worked up Washington Street at 1 Boston Place several years ago (after I watched it being built from my office across the street). It was really on Washington Street.
It’s standard that all large campuses have their own zip code. I think it’s been that way since zip codes were first assigned. It certainly was that way at Washington State University way back in the 70s.
Yeah, for a multinational company, the “details” can even be things like overall strategy for a whole country or multi-country area being defined at that level and approved by the mothership; any regulation affects every branch below its level. It’s a very, very different kind of structure. If you have an account with Santander in the US you do not have one with Santander in England; a Sodexo paycard from France isn’t valid in Tanzania; the laws and regulations to which each of those locations are subject are very different (or at least, different enough that you can never assume they’ll be the same).
We drove by the Sargento headquarters (they make cheese) in Wisconsin once…I noticed on their sign that their address was “One Persnickety Place.” Pretty clever…
Addresses used to just be indications to the Post Office of how to deliver mail. There still are plenty of addresses that are clearly due to this being the main requirement, such as where you send your state tax return in Michigan. It’s just “Department of the Treasury, Lansing, MI, 48whatever”, where “whatever” is different if you are paying a balance due or getting a refund. That’s what the Post Office needs to deliver your tax return, and it gives the addresser absolutely no clue as to where it actually is.
Generally however one’s mail gets delivered pretty close to where one lives (or has one’s business), so the address came to how to determine where something physically is, and not just how to get mail to it, such that the latter became the dominant purpose in most people’s minds, and it just happened to be that such address is how the Post Office also delivers mail. And with all the advances in technology, it’s very helpful to have one’s address physically correspond in a public database with a particular place on the Earth and its associated transportation infrastructure.
Record Archive, a huge used record store in Rochester, lists its address as 33 1/3 Rockwood Street.
If you put 33 1/3 Rockwood St, Rochester, NY 14610 into Google Maps it finds nothing, but if you enter Record Archive it gives you an address of 33 1/3 Rockwood St, Rochester, NY 14610. So, probably a self-designated unofficial address. Cool, though.
