@teenytrinkets wrote:
PO Boxes are a PITA. Not only do a lot of merchants not ship to them, some carriers won't deliver to them. Then what happens if the package is too bulky? Pick up at the post office (another PITA)? Or return to sender? Everyone I know picks up and pays per package because a PO Box just isn't a practical solution...
That is the point of a street addressing program PO Box. The address is not formulated as a PO Box, makes no reference to the address being a PO BOX, hence any carrier will deliver to the address. This is literally the exact same model used by every shipping receiving place. The reason why carriers won't deliver to a traditional PO Box is the address format omits the actual street address since USPS PO Box coding links the extended ZIP directly to the physical address instead of listing the physical address.
Define too bulky? Are you referring to a vehicle, a boat, or a trailer? I've had very large packages delivered with no issue, other than that they prefer you pickup the package in a reasonable amount of time. I frequently see customers picking up their giant 60+ inch TVs from the post office. If you have something extremely large (ie that would fill the entire back of a cargo truck), or would require say a forklift to ferry about, then a shipping receiving service makes sense, but otherwise you are just wasting money assuming you ship regularly enough. Post Offices all have storage space, it doesn't matter if the item can be crammed into the actual physical PO Box, it just goes in the back and you pick it up. If the item can fit in a truck or a cargo van you are good to go.
I've probably ordered from something on the order of a few hundred merchants and haven't had an issue. Any of my commercial shipments under the $800 limit go directly to the US or from within the US via pretty much every major carrier as that cuts my incoming shipping costs dramatically and expedites customs releases since it is a quick pop into the CBSA office at the border to pay the GST and I don't have to worry about the physical mail backlogs nor do I have go through the extremely annoying process of claiming PST refunds for commercial goods because the shipment gets brokered improperly or a CBSA agent can't be bothered to read an invoice and see a shipment is of a commercial nature.
The service is regularly used by people in the US that suffer from porch piracy. There is a reason why the package receiving places are continually trying to lobby the government to get rid of the service, which they have no intention of doing. Times have changed guys. If you aren't leveraging this you are missing out.
