The Farm is on a rural New Mexico Highway. It does not receive USPS service, so we have a PO box. For years, the biggest shipping problem was dealing with the ambiguous websites where it wasn’t clear whether they were using UPS/FedEx (street address) or USPS (post office box). Or when UPS would decide to hand something off to USPS for “last mile” service or some nonsense. But increasingly, most shippers are using some sort of address verification service and apparently whatever address we’ve been using for years isn’t considered real. I couldn’t even get the PO Box to verify on one website today. When I asked UPS, they told me that local drivers typically know where to make deliveries for unverified addresses. But they couldn’t tell me any way to find out what they think the address is. And of course I can’t even use that address if a website won’t allow me to proceed with it.
Our place out in the middle of nowhere in NE AZ does have a mailbox by the highway, but we use the PO Box for everything. Well, except for the bullheads who cannot be bothered with a rural address.
Amazon is one of them. I cannot tell you the number of orders I’ve had kicked back because Amazon doesn’t like the address.
Mind you, UPS knows where we are. Fed-Ex can find us. Home Depot delivers to our house. We’ve even had DHL figure it out. Hell, Sam’s Club has driven right up to the house.
If a company “cannot be bothered” to figure out where I live (I give a County Road number and a lot number), then I can’t be bothered giving them my money.
~VOW
I work for local rural county government in the Colorado mountains. GIS. We assign addresses among other things. A very tight database of addresses and routing systems. Free for the asking. The USPS does not deliver here. UPS and FedX does pretty good but I never have them try to deliver to me.
What I did was get a UPS box at a UPS store. It has an honest to god street address that shippers will recognize. Works great. They email me when a package arrives and I pick it up. Easy, safe and secure.
We have used UPS boxes before but shipments are infrequent enough and the UPS store is far enough that it’s an option I’m hoping to avoid.
The problem here is that they’re using a UPS/FedEx API, and it’s UPS/FedEx are rejecting the address. Individual drivers can find the place, but the companies don’t think it exists. There doesn’t seem to be a way to ask UPS how to deliver to a specific building you can see from the street, as far as I can tell.
According to some places I don’t live here either. UPS has recently (6mos) begun delivery to my gate. Not to the door, tho’. I always give my cel# so they can text (no voice calls work). I GPS in the middle of a lake :smack:
FedX won’t even attempt.
My rural mailbox is far down my unimproved county road. It’s not safe to recieve packages there. I have P.O. box in the little town closest to me. The postmaster when he’s sober will send out a note/memo to my rural box if I have a pkg. in. It’s a big crap shoot if I get mail in a timely manner.
Recently The delivery companies have been trying to change my address to a town about 7 miles away. In a different county with a different zip code. We have always had trouble with delivery. Between being very rural and companies not delivering to a PO Box, we never count on getting something. On the other hand, I have zero fear of something being stolen from my porch.
Don’t ask why, but I have both a PO Box and a street address. I have found that some internet sites simply won’t ship to a PO Box, and specifying FedEx as the shipper means they won’t either.
In my case, I simply change the shipping address, but I wonder what people do who don’t have that option?
Postal regulations forbid anything going to a post office box that isn’t delivered there by the USPS. Anyone else (UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.) needs a street address.
It’s possible UPS, etc. are using the post office for the last mile delivery, but there’s no way for them to be sure if your package will be shipped that way.
The option is to ship via USPS, find a street address for delivery (like your workplace) or ask a friend to accept the package.
But there’s a gray area when UPS shipments are transferred to USPS, which happens often for small parts shipments. It seems to work fine, since the shipper doesn’t know the route a UPS package will take.
When my street mailbox was decimated by a snow plow last winter, I filed a change of address with USPS for 6 months. All shipments originally destined for the street address came to the PO Box, and there was no problem at all (anything too big for the box gets a yellow card in the box that you exchange for the actual package at the window).
So I have shown that although you are correct about only USPS filling the PO Box, it is not true that a shipment must originally begin with the USPS in order to end up in the box.
I can commiserate. We get our mail at a post office box, and USPS doesn’t deliver to our house. UPS and FedEx have always been a problem. When we first moved out here to the boonies 20 years ago, to a house that isn’t visible from the road, there was no street number at all. The best you could do was to say “third driveway on the right,” which was often rejected as an invalid address. Later the county 911 commission assigned us an even street number, though the other houses on this side of the street all had odd numbers. Later, they changed our number to an odd one. But now the numbers are out of order. As you drive down the street, the numbers increase, then start decreasing, before finally increasing again. For years, trying to get anything delivered by UPS or FedEx was a crap-shoot. I would beg people, literally plead with them, not to try to send us anything by FedEx or UPS. A third of the time, if we were lucky, the drivers would deliver it to us, a third of the time they’d leave it a randomly chosen neighbor’s house, and a third of the time they wouldn’t deliver it at all. Through some miracle, they’ve been pretty consistently finding the right place for the last two years or so. This unnatural state can’t possibly persist. God knows what will make it change, but it’s bound to be something.
I’m in a over 55 community of 1400 houses, and lots of small windy roads that all look the same. They are still building, so GPS maps are out of date. FEDEx and UPS will drop things on my porch, but USPS delivers things to the mail hut a mile and a half away. The fun goes up a notch because the mail lady had, I swear, dyslexia, and you get to meet all your neighbors when you have to redeliver/chase your mail.
I’m surprised half the people in here can find their houses, let alone their mail.
I feel ya. There is no home delivery by the post office at my house; however, I’m entitled to a free PO box.
This is usually okay except when I mail-order items that the shipper won’t deliver to a PO box. Some of them won’t accept my home address for delivery because it doesn’t show up as a valid USPS address, since we don’t have home delivery.
The postmaster just shrugged sympathetically when I asked about this problem.
I solve it on a case-by-case basis (send items to a friend, give up on the order, have things delivered to my house if possible even though I worry about porch pirates, whatever) but it’s definitely an annoyance.
All rural houses here have a numbered street address. It was mandated for Emergency Services to be able to find the right house quickly, but also works for mail and parcel delivery.
Another problem I have is my county road # is the same as a very long and well known state highway # across the county from me. That’s always fun.
We were Rt.2 for a long time but thru the 911 stuff we got the new county #. I live right on the county line as well. Our land is in the 2 counties.
Country living is a hoot! (:))
Some of you all have it way worse. Google knows where this place is. A windy road it is not. Drivers are always able to find it. But increasingly, websites won’t let you send an order to an address they can’t verify.
Yeah. In North East Pennsylvania rural routes that had existed for decades got street addresses sometime around 2010 (back when I was in school there, and school paperwork required an address, I provided the rural route number and explicit directions to the house since I had no street address).
Years ago, the USPS split our zip code and we were in the new one. There was a grace period when we could use either.
Then we started having problems. Online stores insisted that our zip code did not exist. Keep in mind the grace period was plenty long enough that anyone checking zip codes should have updated their DB multiple times.
So we’d use the old one and hope we still got the package.
But this is a problem with so many web coders. They have no concept that their idea of “right address” might be wrong.
Sure, give the customer a warning, but if they want to use that address, let them.
We’ve had mail delivered to PO Boxes for decades. Does physical-vs-mailing obfuscation provide a wee bit of security insulation?
We previously lived in a steep mining town with 40% of homes on stairways, not streets. USPS delivered NOWHERE there. New residents were given “the key to the city” - a free PO Box key. Civilian couriers delivered to our house (on a street!) if they could manage the spindly road.
We’re now in a fairly remote mountain village. USPS does not venture to deliver to the dozen houses on our mile of rugged dirt track. We COULD have a tiny box at the end of the road but we’d still have to hit the PO to retrieve anything larger than an ocarina. Garmin GPS is WRONG about routes here, directing traffic on nonexistent paths. We curse FedEx as DefEx because their packages often arrive at incorrect porches, if at all. Yes, the major shippers want address verification, and we give our road address, but with our PO Box number as the ZIP’s final four, so mailings mostly aren’t bounced.
If you’re lucky, your expected packages won’t be on pallets a sloppy Amazon courier leaves at a closed post office to be stolen before employees arrive.
I predict a future based on horrendously ubiquitous surveillance where we’re all known and tracked, and all deliveries reach our LAT/LON coordinates, likely by armed aerial drone. Troglodytes hiding in urban subways and sewers MIGHT be unreachable but they likely won’t order much from Macy’s anyway.
My sister-in-law lives in Smalltown, which has a post office, and she has a post office box for her mail, because home delivery (as well as trash pickup, etc.) is a bit iffy.
If a post office box is not acceptable, we can have it shipped to her house, which is within the boundaries of Smalltown. But the postal delivery route is from Riverviille. So her delivery address, as well as the GPS address, is Riverville.
So then we go with option C which is the other sister-in-law who lives in Watertown and has a “normal” mailbox. But the package is too big, so then she had to go pick it up at the Watertown postoffice. So much fun.
When I was little, I would address cards to my grandparents who lived in the same town. One was Rural Route #2 and the other one was Rural Route #4. I think I switched them rather regularly. Fortunately both routes were served by the same postal office and mail carrier.