MARFA — In May, several Marfans took to social media to complain that the local post office was sending packages back to vendors, claiming labels lacked adequate information needed to tie a resident’s street address to their post office box where they receive the majority of their mail.
The issues arose when a new postmaster — Gisele Villanueva — took over and began enforcing the immediate return of packages with no post office box numbers on the shipping label. “I know what y’all have done before in the past is just the name and the physical address, and y’all are supposed to get it,” Villareal said. “Now what we’re trying to enforce are P. O. boxes, which means adding that P. O. box number onto those packages you’re ordering.”
Villanueva said the problem was that while Marfa’s longtime local employees would know just about everyone in town and where to put the packages, temp clerks and herself as the new postmaster did not know, and postal regulations required a P.O. box in the address as well.
So, add the P.O. box on an address. Sounds easy, right? Not so, according to several people on Facebook who said many vendors don’t deliver to post office boxes and others change addresses customers input to try and match them with United States Postal Services data — which ends up nixing P.O. box numbers the customers have tried to insert.
A work-around offered by the previous postmaster was adding the box number after a hyphen in the zip code. While that worked for some, others found that the vendors changed their box number to another four-digit number trying to match USPS data.
Villanueva — who worked at the Presidio Post Office for nearly a decade before coming to Marfa — offered the following advice:
- If you can use a P.O. box to deliver to, then use it.
- If you can’t, go ahead and add the box number after your name like: Jane Doe 1234
- Also add the number after your street address with a hashtag like: 222 Spruce St. #1234
- If you can track your package or see the shipping information or a label and you see an error, contact the vendor to try and change it. You can also let the post office know of the error and discuss how to make sure the package has the best chance to get to you if it’s already been sent.
Putting the box number after your name has the best chance of not being altered by a vendor, Villanueva said. “The auto-generated addresses and everything aren’t going to mess with your name,” she said. One Facebook user said even that technique failed, but many others reported it working.
Villanueva said she can sometimes glean additional information from her system to see how a package was addressed, such as photographs of the label, but that almost all of the time what she sees is what the customer sees when tracking a package.
Despite calls for USPS complaints, investigations and petitions from Marfans on Facebook, the uproar seems to have subsided, and Villanueva said she hopes everyone hears about and follows the new address routine. “There’s still a few kinks here and there,” she said. “There’s still a few packages that do get returned … We’ve had some growing pains, but I think everything has gotten a lot better.”