If you’re very rural in the United States, the post office will not deliver your mail to your physical address. In fact, you may barely know your physical address.
You’re a PO Box user, and you don’t have to pay for the box, because it’s mandated that when the Postal Service thinks you’re too remote, they have to issue you a box.
I control a Places account that has an office so remote that it is amongst these rare case.
The fact is, this company wants local business even though it’s not physically accessible, because it can come to them or service them online.
So imagine my surprise when their account got suspended because one of the office locations is a rural PO Box. The entire account, all locations, wiped.
So, I queried it, no luck. tried to get them to see that the PO Box was the only viable address. Only the pin was in the right spot, the address attached was the PO Box.
Now, you realize that the only place that physical addresses are used when you’re that remote is in the County Clerk’s office and drivers licenses. It requires researching via the County Clerk’s office to find out an actual physical address.
So we changed it in Google Places to the physical address that never gets used, even though the business operates only via the post office and the physical address’s mail would never arrive. Anyone trying to find the physical address wouldn’t have been able.
It’s that remote.
So now, anyone sending business mail who looks up the address on Google Places will have their mail disappear into a void, because they’re sending it to a rural address and it simply won’t get delivered.
That is as soon as the account stops being suspended for violating the TAC.
Pretty rotten of Google to shut down this entire business on Places just because one of the offices is in too rural an area to have actual physical addresses. And having no way to petition for the right to use the PO Box, since the postal service didn’t issue them a viable address otherwise.
Whether you agree that this is a problem, not allowing an explanation of what is happening and why the suspension is unjust is an oversight that Google needs to correct.
If they don’t unsuspend the account soon, the whole darn thing will have to be deleted and started over – without the office that has only the PO Box. Which would be tragic for that rural branch of this small business. Every little bit helps when you’re that remote. It’s not always easy to drum up business from way out in the boonies.