Why the stigma ove PO boxes

A couple hundred bucks? How long was this rental for? I’m asking because I’ve got a PO Box at the post office on campus (not sure why I went with it, as I’m mostly paying for it to collect junk mail) and I paid $24 for six months. Of course, it is the smallest box you can get.

The USPS won’t accept packages addressed to anywhere if you don’t pay the postage. Or are you talking about fees for having a PO box? As Ivylass pointed out, in towns like the one where I live, there are no fees for having a PO box, because there is no delivery option.

When you’re ordering from business located in rural areas, the business may not have a choice. We have a real, live storefront and the business has existed for 19 years, but we are forced to use a PO box for our address. You can’t hide behind an official U.S. Government PO box. They require ID to open the box, and they will cooperate with authorities in case of fraud charges.

Before getting too worried about a business with a PO Box, look at their Web site. Ours lists telephone number, physical address, driving instructions, and the names of the owners, and even has a photo of the front of the store.

I refuse to do business with anyone who hesitates to tell me where they actually live and what their home telephone number is. Painful experience has taught that such people are much more likely to be the kind of people that are best to avoid.

I had their largest box. I don’t recall the exact rental fee, but it was around $200.,
give or take, for an annual rental w/ a small discount for choosing to pay long term,
another obvious mistake as I never rec’d. any money back. These are franchises and
the parent corp. is well protected by their contract.

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Does mail addressed to a real street address make it okay to someone’s P.O. Box if they have one instead and the sender didn’t realize it?

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Depends on where you live, elfkin. I live in a town of 200. The postmaster knows everyone. If the envelope has my name on it and the right ZIP code, it’ll get here. In fact, I received one piece of mail that was addressed to a rural route in a nearby town with a different ZIP code and it still got here.

My business is in a town of 2,500. If you send something with a street address instead of a PO Box, it will usually get delivered with a snarky note scribbled on the envelope, unless the postmaster is in a bad mood, in which case it gets returned.

In a big town, no. I just shipped something to a street address in a large eastern city, and it came back to me because I hadn’t used the PO Box. In the cities where the postal employees don’t know everybody, they just can’t take the time to go searching for your PO box number.