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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

It may be stable, but there are certainly issues. I cannot get mail delivered to my home address, and it told me I can only use a residential address, so no tests for me. I am far from the only person with this situation. This is a major fail when the website boldly advertises, "Every home in the U.S. is eligible". They even specifically refuse to send it general delivery to my local post office, which is the usual solution when people refuse to ship to anywhere but my home address.

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Why can't mail be delivered to your house? I'm pretty sure the USPS basically has a mandate to deliver to every home except in extreme cases. I mean, last I heard they still run a dog sled to deliver mail in some of the furthest reaches of Alaska.

I would guess that delivering to residential addresses only is the only way to ensure a limited number per household. Otherwise, you are going to have people trying to get a bunch for resale.

Yeah, that isn't really true. There are plenty of parts of the country they don't deliver to: https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/service-not-available-us...

All those places still have residential mail delivery, just to centralized delivery locations instead of to the door.

USPS won’t deliver to my door, but they will deliver to a mailbox on a paved road about 1.5 miles away. They installed some of those locking CBU things, but not enough for everyone in the area that needs one. So I’m stuck with a non-locking mailbox.

Unfortunately, mail theft went through the roof over the past year. 90% of our packages were stolen. So, we won’t ship anything via USPS anymore and got a PO Box for things that won’t ship UPS/FedEx (which happily deliver to my door).

In the future consider not living in a rural area, but in the suburbs. I've worked as a package handler for FedEx in my past -- delivering a package to a remote location, even if 1.5 miles from a paved road sucks. If you choose to live rurally -- be prepared for the consequences such as mail delivery issues, self managed water sources, intermittent power, etc.

Just moved to a rural area 2 years ago. Will never move back to the suburbs. My water tastes better than any city water. We do shut off the well when it gets below 20 or so (a few times a year max), but it’s no big deal because we always see it coming and stock a few gallons. Mail issues have never been a problem. Our power has been more stable out here than in the city of 50k where I moved from. Gig fiber here with massive upgrade potential in the future because they ran 12 strands to my house. I only hear crickets and wind at night. Occasionally the dogs if they have to run the coyotes off. Why would I move back to the city?

So you have residential mail, you just have chosen not to use it.

Most small towns in Alaska have PO Box only service, not residential delivery.

But, it looks like the covidtests site correctly recognizes at least some of these zip codes and is allowing non-residential addresses, which is impressive.

one would assume usps would have the best data regarding residential addresses, so I assume "where you live" is not a residential address. Part of the reason they are delivering to residential addresses (and no "to the local post office") is to limit the orders by household, and avoid scalpers reselling those tests.

Obviously ideally they should be limiting the orders by person, but without national id and with scalpers ready to make a penny wherever they can we cannot have nice things.

> I assume "where you live" is not a residential address.

It is. But there are definitely a lot of assumptions that happen. The USPS occasionally reports to HUD that my home is unoccupied because it has no mailbox, which leads HUD to report such to my bank, which makes them report to my insurance company, and then I get a call telling me they cannot insure a house that is unoccupied, and I have to explain it to them... again.

Anyway, yeah, I get the reason why they'd limit it to residential addresses. But its the "Every home in the U.S. is eligible" that is a bit of a slap in the face. Don't say it if you know it isn't true, and they know it isn't true because they address it in their FAQ.

This sounds a lot like you’ve decided personally you don’t want mail delivered to your house, not that USPS won’t deliver. USPS tries to deliver to your house and fails because you don’t have a mailbox…

Conversely I placed an order and had it sent to my PO Box with no hassle. I don't live in an area where (free) box only service exists.

Why can't you get mail delivered to your home address? Isn't delivering mail to every residential address the main mandate of the USPS?

I'm way off any public road and there's nowhere to put a mailbox. I could get a PO Box at the local post office, but why should I pay for that when I can get my mail delivered to my office location?

There's pros and cons to every living situation. The frustration you're experiencing is entirely of your own creation. I'm glad the post office has not spent time optimizing their program on the edgiest of edge cases here, like your housing decision to live in a house with no mailbox. Maybe they eventually get around to it, but in no way should they have waited to roll this out to address your use case.

I no longer have that problem but let me give an example. Person lives in a small condo complex that does not provide a cluster box (CBU) for mail delivery by USPS. Residents then must get a PO Box for delivery or, if they are short term seasonal in a rural area, they may be able to get the post office to hold mail at the counter for them to pick up periodically (they aren't thrilled to do this either).

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