So I was killing time this morning by hanging out on NextDoor.com which, for those unfamiliar, is a Facebook-style social network, but designed around local areas and neighborhoods. It has its fair share of cranks and loons.
Anyway, a woman came on today and complained that a company had shipped her package to the wrong address. The package, according to her story, was NOT misdelivered by the USPS. It went to the address that was placed on the package by the sender. She is blaming the USPS for not fixing the problem.
She has all the tracking information, and she believes that the post office should either tell her what address it was delivered to, and/or send someone out to the address to fix the problem.
What responsibility does the post office have here?
It seems to me that the job of the post office is to deliver the package to the address listed on the box. It has done that. It’s not the post office’s fault or the mail carrier’s fault if the sender got the address wrong when labeling the package. In fact, I was also under the impression that it’s either illegal or against regulations for the post office to deliver mail anywhere except the address listed on the item, but I might be wrong about that.
Also, if the woman who order the package has the tracking information, as she claims, wouldn’t that show what address the package was delivered to? Whenever I track USPS packages online, I thought that they listed the delivery address. I don’t currently have a tracked package coming, so I can’t check.
USPS tracking includes ZIP, city, and state, not address. (This makes sense; if you found or guessed at a tracking number that had a specific address, it would be relatively easy to steal the package by monitoring the tracking number until the moment the package was delivered.)
It certainly should not “correct the error” - as far as the USPS is concerned, there is no error to be corrected.
The post offices (not just USPS, but around the world) will make an attempt to correctly deliver the mail, even with incorrect or incomplete information. For instance, if someone mailed something to me, and included my name, but omitted my apartment number, it would probably still get to me… eventually (though of course it would be slower). It might even get to me if the apartment number were wrong… if someone at the post office noticed. But the greater the mistake, the less likely that the post office is going to catch it and even get a chance to fix it.
My two cents is that the lady mentioned in the OP is in the wrong, the USPS delivered the package to the address it was given and so fulfilled its obligation.
Years ago I sent a letter to a friend whose address I had lost, so instead I drew a map on the front of the envelope showing the nearest intersection and noted it was the fourth house in to the south on the west side. Canada Post delivered the letter and there was no noticeable delay.
Really, come on – if the package was addressed to the wrong place of course it was delivered to the wrong place. They fulfilled their job description. The Postal Service is not in the mind-reading business.
I had a really weird USPS issue the other day. I was expecting a package, so I checked the tracking info. It said it was delivered to a PO Box in a post office in the next county. That made no sense, so I was going to start making inquiries. The next day I got the package in my mailbox, but the tracking still showed it as delivered to the post office miles away!
The post office has the responsibility to deliver to the address on the package. The sender is the paying customer, not this woman. The post office owes this woman nothing in terms of tracking down where the package went. Why would they treat such a request as anything but a fraud attempt?
The woman’s beef is with the sender. Or maybe herself, who knows.
Once the package has been marked delivered (even in error), the tracking information visible to the public does not update any more. Additional scans are visible internally, but only scans up to the first “delivered” scan are visible publicly. Stupid – I know.
There are two possibilities:
One: The package was misrouted and marked delivered at the wrong address and then somebody (customer or postal employee) noticed the error and returned the package to be redelivered.
Two: There are two packages in the system with the same tracking number. It happens. I have watched a package with scans hundreds of miles apart within minutes of each other – it’s obviously two packages with the same number moving in different places at the same time.
I can see that she’d want to have the address, so that she could go there and ask for/demand her merchandise, but the post office does not want to be in the middle of that. IIRC, when merchandise that you didn’t order arrives at your address, you are under no obligation to give it back or to pay for it. That may be different if a package comes with someone else’s name on it. I’d have returned it with No Such Person At This Address, but I don’t know if we’re legally required to do so.
I wonder if she was hoping that someone on NextDoor would recognize the delivery and message her to come pick her stuff up.
Can you imagine what kind of messes could happen if people could ask the USPS to go take something that was delivered to a neighbor and give it to them?
Actually, this is precisely the reason she gave. She was asking if anyone had received a package they didn’t expect.
The posting is gone now, so either she got her package somehow, or she got sick of people like me telling her that it was stupid to blame the post office and to expect it to fix a problem that it didn’t cause.
Of course, whether NextDoor would be useful or not would depend on just how the address was wrong. In Cleveland, for instance, the numbered streets can be East or West, and they’re arranged such that W. 70th is 140 blocks away from E. 70th. We occasionally got misdelivered mail that way when I was a kid, and of course we didn’t know the family living at our doppelganger address on the far side of town.
Once a letter was delivered to me that had been sent with the wrong zip code. The letter was routed to the post office with that zip code with no regard to the city and state written on the envelope. That post office then routed back to my city. It took about two weeks from mailing date to get to me, which normally would have been two days.
In D.C. there are quadrants and some addresses could be NW, NE, SW, or SE.
