"I'm in and out. No commitments yet" ‒ Peppina, owner, Post Box, July 29, 2026, when I asked when I…read morecould come get my mail.
For over 30 years I have been a customer of Post Box, since February 1995.
On April 22, 2026 I came in for my mail. The young man at the counter checked the back and told me there was nothing there. Hours later the owner emailed me: "I checked w Gabriel, you did not pick up your large envelopes in the back." I have not been able to get that mail since.
In June and July I did not find the shop open. I went ten times, at different hours of the day, all within the hours posted on the door and on Google. Shut every time. Shades drawn, which I had never seen in all my years there. On my last visit, July 27, in the middle of the day, a neighboring business told me Post Box is not open.
On July 29 I emailed asking whether the business was closed, since no one was answering and the shop was shuttered. Her reply: "I'm in and out. No commitments yet."
My account is paid through October 1, 2026. On March 5, 2026, at the request of the owner, Peppina, I paid $216 by Zelle. That evening she wrote to me: "That would make you next due October 1, 2026."
I have since discovered that she was paid twice for the same six-month period the previous fall. I had given her a card number by phone days before that visit. When I came in she told me she had never received it, so I wrote her a check for $220.50, which she deposited. Twelve days later she charged the card she said she never got, for the same six-month period.
August 1 was the first time anyone answered in weeks. I reached her at the number posted on the door. She said she wasn't feeling well. The moment I asked about my mail, she told me I owed her money. I said I didn't, that I had paid and she had acknowledged it. She hung up on me. She never once acknowledged that the shop was closed.
Over five days and eight emails she asked for six different things, and never once named an hour when someone would be at the shop to hand me my mail. I offered to pay money I didn't owe, and to come at any hour to meet her or anyone she named. She said no to all of it. She then told me she was closing my box, and that any mail arriving afterward would be "à la carte. No box, no key, at $5 per piece," on an account paid through October 1.
On August 14 she wrote: "we are open 7 days a week... See you, Gregg, with the key." On August 15 I went in. My box was empty. The front door was wide open, mail stacked on the floor mid-sort, no one there for ten minutes. When the owner appeared I said hello. She didn't answer. She said, "You have the key." I said yes, I'd trade it for my mail. She said no. I asked to see the mail. She said no, and told me to get out of her business. Fifteen seconds, start to finish.
In her recent responses to other customers' reviews of this business, she has denied that any mail theft ever occurred here. In August 2022, when I was out of state and had asked her to forward my mail, it never arrived. On August 7, 2022 she told me it had been sent. Five days later, when I said I still had not received it and asked for tracking, she gave me a number that turned out to belong to someone else's package, delivered months earlier on the other side of the country. Only after I caught that did she tell me the mail had been stolen from her lobby. On August 13, 2022 she emailed me: "Bad news, the entire bucket of mail was snatched from my lobby yesterday evening. I am gathering intel and contacting the postal inspectors office."
For most of my years here, this shop was owned by Marie Firl. She was organized, kind, and completely reliable. She died in June 2013. I'm posting this for the people who remember what this place used to be, and for anyone deciding whether to trust it with their mail now.
