SEELEY LAKE - First, I want to express appreciation to the staff of the Seeley Lake Post Office. They have undergone a complete transformation in the last several months with a new postmaster and 100 percent new staff. Now they are learning our area and our box holders and addressees, all while operating with a shrinking budget and declining staffing, over which they have no control. And yet they try. The challenges are many and the frustrations are climbing. Most of us deeply appreciate what you do.
Many of us do not have street delivery of mail, either by design or because it’s just not feasible where we are physically located. So, we use post office boxes for mailing. This works great when letters and packages are addressed to our post office boxes. Not so well sometimes when addressed to our physical locations.
Those of us who order things online deal with some shippers who refuse to allow us to enter a PO Box for shipping to, so we can only enter a street address. Not great if we don’t have mail delivery to our residence. This especially becomes a problem when the shipper uses something like UPS Smartpost. UPS carries your package to our local post office to finish the delivery process. That only works if UPS provides the post office with your PO Box number when you don’t have a physical mail delivery service. If no PO Box is provided, USPS staff, who don’t know you, will not associate the street address with your PO Box number. This means they have to spend some tedious time they don’t have to try to convert the street address to an actual PO Box number. They’re understaffed, and through no fault of their own, lack the sophisticated software on their computer system that would speed up this process.
There is an effective work-around I use regularly.
When you place your order online or over the phone, make sure you provide more than just your street address. It’s fairly simple and non-tasking to add your PO Box number to your shipping address when placing an order online or over the phone. Just add a second line to your address.
Here you can state your PO Box XXXX or (when they won’t accept the words “PO Box”) just print “#xxxx (# followed by your actual PO Box number). With some shippers you actually have to put the #xxxx at the end of the first line of your address to get away with this. So your address might read, “1234 Rocky Mountain Lane, #1234
If you are not taking the extra step when ordering to include your box number, you are just making life more difficult for the postal staff trying very hard to help you. Ultimately, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.
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