While it’s fun to dis on USPS, don’t discount the idea that the jail staff did not bounce your letter. Anecdote does not equal data but in my experience jailers will take any excuse not to deliver a letter. An imperfect address or not including the jailed person’s “record number” is enough. Usually it take a couple of tries to figure out exactly what the jailers want.
Either you are living in the past, or your letter is a postcard. The current price for a simple, 1 oz. letter is 55 cents.
Forty cents then.
CMC fnord!
Here’s my story of post office incompetence.
I had ordered a package last October. I received an email from the company telling me it was on its way, being delivered by UPS. I was given a tracking number so I could follow its travels.
UPS often contracts with the post office for local deliveries. Rather than deliver a package to your door, they deliver it to your local post office and pay the postal service to make the delivery to your door. This was the case with my package.
The tracking number reported on my package’s location every step along its route until it got to my town’s post office. At that point, it stopped posting notifications. It was not delivered to my house. After a few days, I went to the post office and asked them what happened. They had no idea.
At first they denied ever having had my package. I showed them the tracking document that said they had received it. They also claimed that they probably had delivered it. I again pointed out that the tracking document did not show any delivery to my address. I pointed out that the last location listed on the tracking document was in the building we were standing in and therefore it was probably still here, sitting on a shelf. They argued against this possibility but when I persisted they finally agreed to go look around. When they came back they said they couldn’t find it anywhere and they had no idea where the package was. But they were very clear that whatever had happened wasn’t their fault (even though they had no idea what it was that had happened) and they accepted no responsibility.
I then received an email from the company I had bought the package from. The package had been returned to them. For some reason, my local post office had received my package and decided that rather than deliver it to my house three blocks away, which was the delivery address on the package, they should instead return it to the sender. Who was in Australia.
The company was asking if there had been some problem and if I no longer wanted the package. I told them I did want the package and explained what my post office had done. The company agreed to ship it a second time (without charging me) but said they didn’t want to ship it through the same post office. They asked for an alternative address where I could receive it. I agreed this was a good idea and gave them my brother’s address.
The package never arrived at my brother’s house. As I followed the second tracking number, I was surprised to see it delivered to my brother’s local post office - and then rerouted to my local post office. Apparently my local post office had contacted my brother’s post office and told them to reroute any mail with my name on it to them. They received the rerouted package (which had my name on it but had my brother’s address). They then left a notice at my house saying I should come pick up the package at the post office. They then told me I had to pay additional postage for the shipping between my brother’s post office and the local post office.
My local post office had managed to deliver the package to the wrong address twice and get paid three times for doing so. They also told me again that they did not regard any of what had happened as their fault or responsibility.
This must be a new thing because something similar happened yesterday. I had to mail something to the state Supreme Court and I took it to the post office. I was overnighting it so I (attempted) to pay at the counter. For years, I have used the following address:
Clerk of Court
State Capitol Rm E-317
Charleston WV 25305
The worker told me that they could not accept that as it was not a valid address. Again, I have been using it for years. Don’t know what to tell me, he said, but they couldn’t take it. No reason given, no I’m sorry sir, no explanation, just they can’t do it. I looked on the website to find this address:
Edythe Nash Gaiser, Clerk of Court
State Capitol Rm E-317
1900 Kanawha Blvd. East
Charleston WV 25305
That worked and package was overnighted. My same complaint stands. Everyone knows where the state capitol is. It is that giant, sprawling marble building with a dome on top of it that is visible from everywhere. If you had never been to Charleston, WV but drove there for the first time, you would be able to easily locate the state capitol.
Nobody at the Charleston, WV post office would have any issue with finding the state capitol. If the new automated software requires this needless piece of data, then that is a regression in service, not progress.
I mean, if I am the post office in Baltimore, MD, I don’t need to know where the state capitol in Charleston, WV is; only the people in Charleston need to know that. So just look for the city/state and/or zip code and send the mail there. If they cannot figure it out, then return it. I paid to send it to Charleston so send it there. If I had sent it regular mail and it was returned, I think I would have went crazy for the second time in a week.
in 2019?? hasn’t been that cheap in years
You guys need to get electronic filing.
That last one sounds like they couldn’t actually enter it into the system without a street name and all that.
I will thus blame the software. Even if it must require exact addresses, it should at least be able to search and offer what it thinks that address is. For the situation you mention, the street address would pop up automatically.
I mean, said feature exists online. If I mistype my home address online, the website (not my browser) will often come back with a the official version of my address. The databases of what addresses are valid exist, so why not use them?
Worse yet, they expect all the rest of us other postal customers (who are smart enough to put a valid address on the envelope) to subsidize the extra cost to the post office of fixing their bad addressing.
The extra effort & cost should fall on the person who mailed the bad address, not on the other postal customers.
So, this frightening new bad service is that…mail needs an address?
The post office has for years gotten mail to a recipient with a lesser than complete or even a mistaken address. The question is why has the service fallen off.
Again, that had always worked in the past: State Capitol, Charleston, WV. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find it, and the street address is meaningless and there to satisfy the computer which the Post Office itself now requires.
If I address a letter to Nancy Pelosi, US Capitol Building, Washington, DC, shouldn’t any carrier with half a brain be able to get my letter there? Kicking it because of their own computer system, not because of any inability to get it there, is terrible customer service.
And if the USPS did try to guess what you meant when you gave them half an address, and they guessed wrong, I suppose you would be saying “well, at least they tried, right?”
Or would you be even madder, especially since they would silently deliver your address to the wrong person and it would take even longer to find that there was an issue.
Really? Is that how you would feel?
Sometimes staff at the local PO puts mail in the wrong box. I check all our incoming now to make sure they’re for Box 888 not Box 868. If there’s a yellow package-pickup notice, I wave it at Dave or Kelli at the counter as I have for 18 years and they don’t bother to ask my box number. When we went traveling for months, they stored our incoming. How long will commercial shippers hold items before returning them?
A cousin had been a senior postal official. He taught me that ZIP+4 is our friend.
In theory, I should be able to address a letter to : <my last name>, <my zip code> and have it get to me, since I am the only person in this zip code with my last name.
I tried it once, and it got bounced, so it’s clear that there are some minimal addressing requirements below which the USPS won’t even bother trying to deliver.
In the mid to late 1970s, my brothers and I would send letters (well, cards usually) home from college addressed to “Ma V, <zip code>”, which always got there. We weren’t even the only family with a name starting with V, but the postal clerk of the small town (pop < 1000) played bridge with mom so figured it out. And if they were intended for another Ma V, our mom would have walked them to their house.
Wouldn’t expect that to work any more. But in another thread someone asked if General Delivery was still a thing and the answer was yes. So possibly “Ma V, General Delivery, <zip code>” might get it there. And since all mail goes to post office boxes (no home delivery in town at all), it might even end up in her PO box.
ETA From a USPS web page:
An example of a properly-formatted General Delivery address looks like this:
JOHN DOE
GENERAL DELIVERY
ANYTOWN, NY 12345-9999
I can tell you that. Here is a one page pdf of the number of people employed by the postal service from 1926 to 2019. There are 1/3 fewer employees now than there was in 2001. In fact there only slightly more than double the number that there were in 1926.
When I was a summer sub carrier 50 years ago, the people who sorted the mail (they didn’t let me near that job for good reason) would know the details of the route, just like ** Hi Medlo** said. You can have that again if you double the number of postal workers and probably double the cost of a stamp. Want to do that?
Why I was in college we sent letters to ourselves using only our name, the MIT building number of our dorm, including the room, and the zip code. It always worked. Wouldn’t work any more I bet.
Time was, they did all that (sometimes, I guess) for FOUR CENTS.
Yo ho, here’s a tale from 40-some years ago:
Persons of a certain age, and living in a certain region, will remember that the San Francisco Chronicle had a regular columnist named Herb Caen.
Story was, someone somewhere sent him a letter. The address consisted of a little picture of a marijuana leaf and a little picture of a candy cane, and below that the words “San Francisco”.
It got to him.