We spend the winter in California, but have lived in the Walla Walla area for 13 years. About 7 to 10 days prior to leaving for the winter we make sure we fill out the US Postal Service card to forward our mail to the temporary address in California. This past year we noticed after a while we were getting very little correspondence. After calling the Walla Walla post office asking to please fix the problem, we soon find out they started to forward only some of our mail to California, but the rest was being delivered to our house in Walla Walla. We call them again and felt things were finally fixed, but we just found out that some of our correspondence is being returned to the sender with a yellow label: RETURN TO SENDER, UNABLE TO FORWARD - NOT KNOWN. We cannot believe how they could mess things up again and again!
For the last three years similar things have been having. Just one incident as an example, we were going to be gone for less than one month and filled out the appropriate card for the mail to be held for the month and went in person to the post office to give them the formal request.
When we got back, we found they had continued to deliver our mail in our box by the road to the point it got so full that envelopes were falling on the ground and we lost a lot of important items. So we went in person to the post office to make a complaint and requested that the mail would be placed in a mail box attached to the house, just in case this would happen again.
The manager was very rude and said she would not be able to allow us to change the location of the mail box because she was going to have to pay more to her delivery person for walking to the house (most residents have their mail box fixed to the house and not by the road and, by the way, we have a very short driveway). After insisting and asking her to be responsible for the lost correspondence, she agreed.
We have been very frustrated with the poor service and lack of efficiency with the post office in Walla Walla, although we have heard from friends living in other states that they are having similar problems. Now we can see why the US Post Office is doing so poorly. read more