I remember as a kid that people would send mail to my house in pretty creative ways and it got there. I was told that the post office prided themselves on the ability to deliver mail to misdelivered addresses.
I guess that isn’t the case anymore.
I addressed a letter to an inmate at a prison in a small town in WV. It really isn’t even a town. The prison is the town.
So let’s say that this is the correct address:
John Didwrong, Inmate
Name of Prison
12345 Prison Lane Road
East Bumblegoo, WV 26888
I address it:
John Didwrong, Inmate
Name of Prison
12354 Prison Lane
East Bumblegoo, WV 26888
See, I got the town and zip code right, but transposed the last two numbers of the street address of the prison. It was returned to me the next day as “Return to Sender…No Such Number…Unable to Forward”
My address is:
My Name
123 Fake Street, Apt 45
Big City, CA 98765
However, I have had things addressed to:
My Name
123 Fake Street
Big City, CA 98765
and it was delivered, no problem.
Of course, this works better with USPS, which has a lot of mail addressed to me so it knows which apartment number it should be, than with UPS or FedEx, which does not. In fact, on a number of occasions, I got a postcard from UPS saying that it could not deliver a package because the apartment number was missing - and the postcard also didn’t have the apartment number on it, but USPS knew how to get it here.
it is not uncommon for the post office to not deliver my mail and return it to the sender. Even with the address correct. Federal Exam test result, Income tax letter, purchased items. These are things they contact me about saying it was refused “no such address” I have a very simple address. I constantly get other peoples mail and other addresses mail, why cant they deliver mine.
I ordered a package of silk thread. it arrived SIX MONTHS after the Post office says they delivered it to my address.
and it would get there. And that is in a town of 11,000.
I mean, the prison is the only thing in this town. If it wasn’t for the prison, there wouldn’t be a post office there. And it took 15 days to be returned. There is simply no way that the postmaster could not have looked at the letter and delivered it.
However, this is not a “me bitching about the post office” thread. Did they change something somewhere to stop a human from looking at this letter?
In the old days, they would look at the city and zip code and send it along to the post office for that area, who would have been familiar with the prison and been able to deliver it even if the address weren’t right.
Nowadays, when your local post office gets the letter, a computer scans it and tries to match the address with one that they have in their giant database. If they don’t find a match, there may be other things they can do, but since this is happening at your local post office and not at the one in East Bumblegoo, there’s no person around who’s familiar with the area and can say, “Oh, they must mean…”
the post office is mostly automated these days and what isn’t is temp workers even the mail delivery guys
these days the mail comes sorted in a box so they can go from one side of the street and up the other and not ever look down… so someone sent it back as a wrong address and it had ot go through the system all over again
But even in the good old days it still took a letter i mailed to my self 4 days to go two towns over to get sorted and then come back to me
More than once, I’ve been out in the yard working and said hello to the postman as he dropped things in my box near the street. Later when I went over, there’d be a notice in with them mail about not being able to deliver because there was no one to sign for it.
The second time it happened, I went to the post office right away with the notice and they gave me the package. Obviously it hadn’t even gone out with the postman who’d just been too lazy to want to ask for a signature.
It depends.
In cities and large suburban areas the delivery is done by full-time unionized employees (mostly). In more rural areas, or ex-rural areas that have built up, the delivery is done by contract employees.
So, it depends on where the delivery occurs.
Retired mailman here.
As several have mentioned, automation has changed a lot. When I first started with the Postal Service, most of the first class mail was sorted by clerks on site, just a few feet from where the carriers were putting up their mail. It was quite common for a clerk to shout out something like “Who has Uncle Moose and Aunt Pansy?” and they’d get a reply.
We sort of took pride in getting the mail to our customers.
Another factor is, you might not have the same carrier every day. There is much more use of part timers and casual labor who don’t know who lives where, whose uncle lives with who, and who lived there ten years ago.
Old days: human looked at address.
New days: computer looks at address.
Maybe if and when the USPS gets some real AI in on the game, esp. for rejected letters, things will get better.
Talking about automation screwups: Mrs. FtG has a relative who lives on a street that is also a state name. (Think 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.) All too often our mail to him gets bounced once it passes thru that state and back. Zip code? Pffft. The little bar code under the address? Well, we’ll just paste the “right” one over that. Etc.
But even with automation, why wouldn’t they simply check for a valid zip code/city and then send it to the local post office to attempt the other processes?
Barring that seemingly easy step, if a computer scanned it, found an invalid address and wanted to return it, why would it take 15 days to do so if it stayed at the local sorting center? What “other processes” wouldn’t have caught this? A simple google search of the prison name would have shown that it was in this town and given the correct address.
I’ve heard that you all take pride in getting letters delivered. I could understand if because of temp workers, the new guys weren’t as familiar with the community and didn’t know where Uncle Moose lived so they returned it. But this is a giant prison that cannot be missed by anyone who lives near the town.
It just seems to me like a very poor internal process. I sent a letter a few months ago and after a couple of weeks, it was returned because the postage was 15 cents deficient. I used the scale on Stamps.com to weigh the letter! They had my billing information printed on the letter and could have added it if it was an error. It seems that they spent far more than 15 cents by returning it to me than by simply delivering the damn thing in the first place.
I mean (and this is getting a little bitchy) what other organization that is failing wants to piss off a customer over 15 cents or fail to deliver a letter to a place that is pretty easily discerned based upon the address even if a number is transposed?
Is it really the case that if I write a letter complaining to the President and I mistakenly put “President Donald Trump, 1060 Pennsylvania Avenue” (instead of 1600) that it will bounce? That seems like a rather poor effort.
Mail sorting had been automated for quite a long time now. And really it’s pretty good, the machines can scan and read most anyone’s handwritten/printed/scrawled/illegible to people sloppy chicken scratch scribbles and get the mail to the intended recipient. I don’t know if this part it true any longer, but the delay in returning undeliverable mail(because of mistake in address) is or was because before they’d return it a real live human would look at it and try to figure it out first. I agree that it’s sort of a shame that the “small town/delivery route” feel has disappeared. I used to know all the postal workers at my local post office and they knew me, and my brother and my mom and my sister and my dad because Dad started as a clerk and retired as a post master. Those days are pretty much gone forever though.
I tried something similar this Christmas. I wanted to send a letter to a relative who had moved and I didn’t know her address so I sent it to her care of her Dad who had lived in the town 20 years. Google had a couple different addresses for him so I just sent it to the town, state and zipcode. The post office returned the letter.
NOTE: THE TOWN HAS A POPULATION OF UNDER 350 PEOPLE.
After it was returned I did further research and found his PO box number there and resent it. This time it got through.
This past Saturday we were both home all day. We get a notification from Amazon that a package delivery attempt was made but there was no one to sign for it. Sure enough, in the mailbox was a notice from the USPS that our package would be waiting at the Post Office. There’s no way that the mail carrier tried a proper delivery of that package. We live rural; I’m guessing the carrier didn’t want to get out of their vehicle.
That being said, I have to hand it to mail carriers on food donation day. I don’t know how they do it. That’s one of the silliest ideas the USPS has ever come up with.
Lemme see if I understand this. You (anyone) mailed a letter with an inadequate or incorrect address, and you expect the Post Office to bend over backwards, correct your mistake, and deliver it, all for fifty cents?
Used to be that way Musicat. But now, what with the pension mandate put in place but congresscritters(the sponsors of which I somehow feel have some sort of interest in the demise of said usps) in combination with the advent of electronic communication,has forced the USPS to seriously wring every bit of efficiency they can anyway they can out of the money they have to actually conduct their mandated mission, deliver the mail.
As others have noted, the letter almost certainly never got anywhere near that town; a sorting center in a town of 350,000 (or 3.5 million) saw and rejected the incomplete address. Automated equipment in the FIRST sorting center to handle your letter (so, one close to you) reads the address and prints a barcode on the envelope with the delivery point (ZIP+4, plus two extra digits identifying the exact mailbox); subsequent equipment reads that barcode to route and sort the mail to its final destination. Without a complete address the equipment can’t locate the appropriate barcode; a human will try to, but it’s a human who’s likely never seen the town and knows nothing about the inhabitants. The post office no longer forwards mail to the delivery post office for sorting, since it’s all done by machine and arrives presorted.
I’m not sure just how many alleged humans reside in my rural ZIP code, maybe around 4k-6k. Our modular home is down a dirt track that USPS avoids. We’ve used PO boxes for decades (hoping for some anonymity). Some shippers demand a road address. I try to jigger that by adding our PO box number as the ZIP’s plus-four. But even when that fails, the local PO staff knows that [X address] belongs to [Z PO box]. I grabbed such a mailing today.
