So, if the address is not USPS deliverable, (which happens in rural locations where they give their street address ONLY to Amazon, not realizing that not everything comes in an Amazon truck, so both street address and PO Box are needed) Amazon does not list USPS as a choice of carrier in “Buy Shipping”.
But they DO list “UPS Ground Saver”, which us really “UPS Surepost”, where UPS does the easy job of delivering to the local post office or sorting center, and the USPS does the actual delivery “last mile” (or maybe “last 10 miles”), which often adds a day or 2 to the claimed UPS “estimated delivery date”.
That issue has been like that for 20+ years; however … in the past few years, the post office has been working to get the street addresses matched to PO Boxes.
We personally fall under this category. At least in our little town, they have done the computer work to match them up so we have a zip four address and a PO Box (where all mail goes through).
It’s really an USPS issue where the more rural areas are not brought up to standard and the result is what you see on Amazon and other places that use the USPS database to validate addresses.
Does UPS complete the final delivery to locations where the USPS does not deliver?
We are a commercial address (warehouse) and most of our UPS SurePost or UPS Ground Saver are actually delivered by our regular daily UPS driver. Very few are delivered by our local Post Office.
This makes me wonder if UPS Ground Saver or UPS SurePost knows ahead of time to let the UPS driver complete the delivery, or do they pass it along to the Post Office anyway?
In the past 20+ years (about 15 on Amazon) I have only had ONE shipment refused by a PO when the buyer didn’t put in their PO Box number in the address.
Those small Post Offices pretty well know their customers and just put it in their box for them.
Before Amazon decided that communication was a bad idea I used to send a notice to those buyers letting them know WHY they needed to include their box numbers.
Now I just mail them and let the clerks do their job!
The one that they returned to me was about $700 of drum heads that the buyer was having shipped to the bar that he played at on the weekends. He was from Canada and the town was about 5 miles form the border.
They had a new clerk on a power trip. The bar was literally kitty corner from the PO and the clerk knew this. I called the bar and got the box number, called the clerk and gave it to them, and they refused to do anything except return the box.
For that one I reported the jerk to PO HQ just on principles!
That would depend on the region and the contract with USPS for that region.
Our UPS driver goes to the post office daily. Usually, the packages dropped off there are either going out on a route for a rural delivery or are small SurePost packages going into mail boxes. The packages going to the post office are delivered to the post office in bags (much like the small packages that go directly through USPS).
The same driver also delivers to houses in town and some of the rural home deliveries.
In short … yes the driver knows which packages go to the post office for delivery.
I would send a package with surepost in this situation and see what happens. Would be an interesting experiment. Maybe UPS will do the delivery if USPS won’t.
I don’t see any issue…Amazon is doing everything they can to get you to buy your shipping from them for this transaction…knowing if it isn’t delivered, they aren’t going to be on the hook for the cost (you are).