Canada Post has decided that home mail delivery is a thing of the past. Across the country, neighbourhood mailboxes and community postal boxes are becoming the new normal.

There is just one small problem.

Many of us have been living that way all along.

In the community where I live, we have never enjoyed home delivery of mail. For more than fifty years I have walked to the Post Office to collect whatever treasures—or bills—have arrived in my box. It is a pleasant walk. In fact, it is so short that driving would seem wasteful.

So when I hear people lamenting the loss of home delivery, I understand their frustration, but I cannot honestly share it. From my perspective, nothing has changed.

Or so I thought.

Like many people, I have become an online shopper. Partly this is because living in a small northern community limits local choices. Partly it is because I have never enjoyed wandering endlessly through stores searching for some elusive item. In today’s culture, where shopping is considered a recreational activity, I may be something of a consumer Neanderthal.

Recently I decided to order coffee from a Canadian company I have used many times before. Everything proceeded normally until I entered my address.

An error message appeared.

“We do not ship to Post Office boxes.”

That seemed odd.

After all, the company ships through Canada Post.

My mailing address is a Post Office box.

And Canada Post is busily encouraging more Canadians to receive their mail through Post Office boxes.

I checked my information and tried again.

Same error.

So I phoned the company.

I explained that their software appeared to have a problem. My mailing address was correct. It had always been correct. The only issue was that their website refused to recognize it as an address.

The customer service representative was polite.

“Yes,” she said. “We know about that.”

“You know about it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“We just can’t ship to Post Office boxes.”

At that point I was momentarily speechless.

The company ships through Canada Post.

Canada Post delivers to my Post Office box.

Yet somehow they could not ship to a Post Office box.

I thanked her for her time and hung up, none the wiser.

Not long afterward, I encountered the same problem with a company in New York. They had successfully shipped an earlier order to me using the postal service. This time, however, their website refused my address.

Again I called.

Again I explained that my mailing address was, in fact, my legal mailing address.

Again I learned that their software no longer permitted deliveries to Post Office boxes.

It seems that somewhere in the world of modern commerce, a programmer decided that a Post Office box is not a real address.

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to consult rural Canada.

Many of us have two perfectly legitimate addresses. One tells people where we live. The other tells people where our mail goes. They are not necessarily the same thing.

This is not unusual. It is simply life outside major urban centres.

Yet increasingly I find myself explaining this reality to businesses that want my money but seem unable to imagine a customer whose mailbox is not attached to a house.

Perhaps there is a lesson here.

Maybe the solution is to abandon online shopping altogether and return to the old-fashioned practice of buying things only when I happen to be in a store that sells them.

If so, I will undoubtedly save a considerable amount of money.

Come to think of it, perhaps the software designers have solved the problem after all.