Update to USPS Street Addressing to PO Boxes:
I have been saying that USPS Street Addressing for PO Boxes can not be used without actually enrolling in the program and attaching that enhanced service to your PO Box account mostly because if that is the case, why have all the rigamarole, indications in any documentation that seems to be available that it is an opt in service, statements that persons wanting to utilize the service must fill out and sign the form, etc if that isn't really the case?
After trying to ask USPS via USPS.com, and receiving gibberish in response, I had pretty much given up finding out the real truth.
I held up the line at the PO a couple of days ago asking the clerk the questions, and as much as I rarely believe what PO clerks or carriers have to say most of the time, I think he might have been not making up answers. Whether we were on the same page on some of the questions is unknown (I would have been lynched by the other customers if I had taken as much time as needed to get everything answered and clarified)
In short, his response was pretty much that anyone with a PO Box can use the Street Addressing option without filling out and submitting the signed form, without attaching the service to their PO Box via their online USPS account. It's a free service, and he said they don't check anything on acceptance from the outside carriers.
That would also mean that sellers can change a buyer's PO Box address to the street address of the buyer's PO in order to use FedEx or UPS for deliveries to the PO Box.
I was picking up a couple of PO box deliveries that didn't fit in my dinky PO Box and were at the counter, and hadn't planned on asking questions, but was thorough as I could be in limited time thinking off the cuff in my interrogation (to the dismay of the people behind me).
He said he works the back sometimes and accepts deliveries, and that FedEx and UPS deliveries come palletized and are accepted via a scan of the pallet as a whole (hoping that he wasn't conflating SmartPost and SurePost deliveries with what I was asking), so there is no way for him to be able to reject a particular FedEx delivery because the destination PO Box holder is not enrolled in Street Addressing, which makes perfect sense.
If so, then FedEx and UPS must be diverting individual PO Box destined pkg deliveries to a holding pattern to be palletized (similar to what they do with SmartPost and SurePost or are adding them to those) if that is the case. He pretty much said they don't reject anything (I didn't have time to go into what USPS does when FedEx delivers a 150lb oversize pkg that is in direct violation of USPS 70lb max parameters and likely Postal Workers union rules)
I think the only way to put this topic to rest would be to get an official USPS policy answer about local PO implementation policies of the Street Addressing program (I tried, someone else's turn).
Looks like maybe it is true that anyone with a PO Box (or someone shipping to that PO BOX) can use the PO Box Post Office actual street address along with the PO Box as a unit number as an address for FedEx, UPS, DHL, Golden State, etc ground or express deliveries, in spite of what the official USPS documentation seems to indicate.
If so, addresses should be of the form:
John Q. Buyer
333 Main Street #123
Anytown, VA 98765
where the street address is that of the PO, and 123 is the PO Box number.
Note that if a signature were required for one of those deliveries it wouldn't be palletized I'd think, and unless the PO Box holder has filled out the form authorizing USPS to sign for him, it would be rejected.
This the clerk seemed to indicate, and makes sense in light of the documentation and the very existence of that authorization form, but I just received a UPS delivery to my PO Box that shows it was signed for which doesn't make sense if it was received in bulk on a pallet unless UPS is just taking the USPS pallet receiver's signature and using it for that sig field on UPS tracking. It was only a $50 item, so probably didn't have sig conf on it, so maybe UPS just put the USPS guy's name in the tracking because they happened to have it for the pallet sig?
There are still a lot of inconsistencies here that don't allow certainty one way or the other.
