More and more, though I enter my physical address AND P.O. Box number, a company's ordering software will summarily dismiss it as an invalid shipping address. Our local post mistress said to put a "#331" (or whatever your P.O. box number is) at the end of my physical address. It looks like it's an apartment or house number but, she said, the local postal workers would know it's a P.O. Box. So I switched at the beginning of the year to doing that when I ordered anything. It's been working great. I get my packages up to a week earlier and they are delivered by hunky guys in shorts (but I digress). Yes, I am getting packages quicker but none of them are sent via USPS. I don't know why. I assume it's because the postal service is the most expensive way to send items and, when I tracked USPS packages in the past, they often sat for days at a location. Therefore I still didn't know that a package sent via USPS would actually be put in my P.O. Box. Finally today I pulled a package out of the P.O. Box. I'd been tracking it and it took some rather illogical routes but here it was. I decided to check that the postal workers had actually used the attached number as my P.O. Box (and didn't just know to associate my name w/ a P.O. Box). The former Post Mistress, who had suggested this trick, retired a month or so ago and this was a new Post Mistress. I showed her the address on the package and explained what I'd done. She assured me that it was OK to do that and most workers would know to use the post office box. Not sure I like the term "most" but, as I said, the majority of packages sent to me (now that I don't use the term "P.O. Box") come via other carriers.
Picture taken by Kathy Novey.
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