Yeah, in NYC this is a major pain point. If I am not home to receive a package, I have to pick it up at the local post office, which has the following properties:

0) Often loses packages (~25% of the time)

1) Does not re-attempt delivery under any circumstances

2) Is unbelievably crowded by customers who are enraged by 3)

3) Staffed by people who do not care about their jobs at all

4) Has a minimum wait of 30 minutes to get your package

Is 30 minutes of my time plus transit to and fro worth more than seven bucks? Probably yes.

You left out the biggest problem with the Post Office - it is often closed when you have the free time to go there.

I've been using private mailbox services for nearly 2 decades now and they have it all over the USPS PO. 24-hour package pickup. They throw away junkmail for you. They will text you when you have a package. They can accept shipments from any carrier - USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.

They will forward mail in batches to another address, say you moved out of state but still want your old address to keep working for another 6 months. If you file a change-of-address form with the USPS they sell that info to anybody with a couple of dollars (like your college alumni association and any other charity you ever donated to). Some will even open your mail for you, scan it and email it to you.

Plus, the address looks like an apartment but it is not your home address - so telling someone where to mail you doesn't also tell them where you live.

As far as I can tell, $6.99 is per delivery so one could presumably batch several packages.

If that's true, that makes the price-point more manageable.

The pricing section now mentions this

"Deliveries can include one or more packages."

Idk if I missed that before or if they just added it.

I completely agree with you. Too bad some of the more convenient Amazon lockers shut down. I might have to get a PO box. I'd much rather use something like Luna.

You can't get stuff shipped to PO Boxes generally.

You can ship to USPS PO Boxes now by putting down the post office's address. Not sure if this service is available at all post offices. Technically its not really even a service...

You can do that to any post office.

The reason is that the software that FedEx, UPS, etc use to plan routes doesn't have something which maps P.O. box numbers to the street address of the post office that they are contained in. And from what I can tell the USPS doesn't publish that database, so even if FedEx, etc really really wanted to, they couldn't without spending several million (or more) to map them all manually.

It's unfortunate that it's not terribly convenient, but once you know the street address of the post office that your P.O box is located at, it's not a problem at all.

He probably meant a private mailing box (PMB) rather than an actual PO Box.

What I'm curious about is how these folks are solving the Form 1583 problem.

Congress passed a law in 2001 requiring any commercial entity to receive mail for another to submit a Form 1583A registering with their local post office as Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA). And then all their customers are required to complete a regular Form 1583 which is designed "verify" their identity and prevent mail fraud.

If they go without the CMRA the USPS can't legally deliver anything to them for their customers so all the small stuff you buy off of Amazon, eBay, etc are all right out. And for a lot of that stuff you're not going to know ahead of time if someone is going to send it via USPS or UPS or FedEx because it'll go whichever way is cheapest.

If they do the CMRA route then getting new customers is a big pain in the ass. I know this because I used to work for a well known CMRA and it was the Achilles heel of the business.

>And for a lot of that stuff you're not going to know ahead of time if someone is going to send it via USPS or UPS or FedEx because it'll go whichever way is cheapest. //

Perhaps it works because you can't send it to them by USPS so they'll never be the cheapest route.

Presumably when Amazon, say, are sending out an item they arrange the collection using some form of API and choose the optimal (by price I expect) delivery route. USPS would simply not be listed and so Amazon would route to Luna as expected.

Maybe it doesn't work like that, just a suggestion.

It would be super-great if that's how it worked, but it's not. There is no send-to-this-person-at-this-address API to see if it's OK to do so. There is no national database of who-lives-where that's in any way unified -- except maybe at the NSA -- and if there is, it's certainly not shared publicly.

Everyone's software doesn't check names in any way whatsoever. I could send a package to: President Abe Lincoln 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington DC 20500

FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, everyone's software would eat that right up and spit out a label. That's because the name portion of the address usually doesn't mean anything. The White House is where it is irrespective of the person receiving the mail there.

Furthermore nearly all of the time this isn't an issue. The vast majority of all mail and packages go to the right address. People tend not to have items shipped to anyone but themselves or perhaps relatives. That's the reason there's a law that writes an exception to normal mail delivery only in the case where someone's doing it as a business (a CMRA).

And the only reason there's an exception there is that some (not all) CMRA owners 10-15 years ago didn't seem to care about preventing fraud and enough people got scammed to where it was a problem. It's expensive to scrutinize the incoming mail enough and that meant that the people who didn't scrutinize had higher profits so there was no corrective feedback through profits and losses. The only way to fix that was to make it a legal issue instead of an economic one.

there's also bufferbox: https://www.bufferbox.com/