Berkeley Post Office Box Annex

This post office needs to scrapped and restarted with new workers. They dislike each other and don’t mind sharing that with the public. They are THE most unhelpful ladies I have ever ever met in any public service job I have ever been to and I believe they might have figured out ways to cheat you concerning money orders and passports.
I’ve been going to this post office for 17 years and it’s only gotten worse. Perhaps it should be torn down. Getting any help from stamps to mailings and now passports has made me go to Martinez where I found out they were overcharging for passports… Buyer be ware. They need to be looked into.

I know all of the post offices are bad. But this one… Oh boy! It’s number one on the list. If there was a site to rate the worst of the worst. This would be número #1 no doubt. Total lack of sympathy or regards for their fellow humans. This are the kind of employees that union creates. And I was all for unions before. Until I worked for one. I went there today to get my passport. I got there, pull a number. It was 45 and they were helping 41. It look pretty good to be true. But it took for ever to get to 43. And a lady came and ask me if I was there to pick up mail. And told me that there was a line for the passport. At this moment I notice that there was only one person being helped and that I was next. After 10 minutes of wait. The post office clerk went in the back doing who knows what. After 30 minutes she came back and said «I’am going to my break» and I said., but I have been waiting for half hour. And she replied., «I’am going to my brake»

Indifferent workers and long, long waits.
I mostly use the automated machine for sending packages, but when it is full… I need a human to attend me. I don’t know why my fellow carbon based humans are so much slower than their silicon counterparts, but it can take upwards of 10 minutes per customer to print a stamp.
The postal service as a whole does work miraculously well, but for some reason, post offices are generally not very good..

Worst than the worst!!!
First of all, they have to serve each customer for more than 10 mins.
10 mins!!!
Slow moving, slow processing, slow everything.
I just wanna pick up the package, and it told me it’s not available now.
What the heck! There’s nothing on the slip state it’s not available!!!
The worst of the worst.
Shame on you!!!

They doesn’t leave deliver notice…

It is almost 2012 and the ladies they have working there still are dumbfounded every time I bring in a package with prepaid shipping. They are rude and try and act like authority figures. They always say «You can’t ship an envelope with delivery confirmation.» Well, guess what? If I drop my package in the mailbox, it gets delivered just fine. Avoid this post office at all costs.

Awful. I hate this place. The people that work behind the counter are the worst kind of government employees: rude, slow, and incompetent. Good luck.

This post office just sucks really really bad. I needed to ship a birthday gift to San Diego and was wondering if a flat rate box or a regular box would be cheaper. The man behind the counter gave me a flat rate box, saying it would be a better deal based on how much my items weigh, handed me a role of packing tape (no scissors, mind you, so I had to cut it with my house keys) and when I finally come back, the lady acts like I am an idiot for choosing flat rate shipping because it was more expensive.
I told her that the other man recommended it, and she said «Oh, yup,» in a way that suggested this man made such mistakes a lot. I could have repackaged everything again, but because it had literally been over 30 minutes since I walked in the door and I was running late, I just paid the expensive flat rate size. He didn’t even give me the correct flat rate size!!!
Anyway, to be clear, this is a review for the post office on Milvia and Allston, not for the nearby annex.
Will definitely be going out of my way to AVOID this post office next time I need to mail something!

I ordered something to have it express mailed, which means it’s suppose to arrive the next day right? WRONG! My package was suppose to arrive June 25^th. It is now July 6^th and my package is no where to be found. There was not yellow slip or any indication they attempted to deliver it.
I called the Berkeley Post Office many times to have the phone just ring until it disconnects or ring and have someone pick it up and hang up. Did they really think I would just give up? Eventually I got a hold of Jose, who is the manager. He promised to look into it. I called him later that day, the next morning, and the day after that. Every time he says the same thing, «I’ll go look for it and call you later»…call me later my ass! Just spoke to him again this morning… and he had the nerves to say that he forgot and that he had no idea where my package was.
I paid extra to have my package expressed mail…11 days later, still no package. If you live in Berkeley like I do, you are shit out of luck.

If you can avoid this place, do so by all means. The people behind the counter work really, really slow. Most of the time, they tell you you have to fix something minor and instead of letting you fix it on the side and send it off, they make you get a new number. Super frustrating! Avoid USPS in general. This branch included.

I think a lot of the negative reviews here are misplaced. As in they’re reviews of a completely different place. The main Berkeley post office is just down the street, and it is, indeed, one of the worst post offices in the history of post offices. But this is the Post Office Box Annex, which isn’t a post office at all. It’s just a room with P.O. boxes in it.
I really like it. I won’t explain exactly why I like it, and I won’t even explain why I won’t explain that, as that wouldn’t be good for me for reasons I won’t explain. Suffice it to say that I love being able to walk through a P.O. box corridor without having to deal with surly postal workers. It’s set up identically to thousands of P.O. box rooms in post offices across the country, and it’s not even completely filled up yet; there are blank walls that have room for additional P.O. boxes. Oh, and there are handy security fish-​eye mirrors at each nook, so no one can sneak up on you while you’re going about your clerk-​less postal business.
I’d give it four stars except that the postal worker who picks up the mail from the slots isn’t consistent. Everything takes an additional day when it is mailed out from here, which means either the guy doesn’t check it as often as he should or there’s some kind of weird dead space between the mail slot and the box the letters are supposed to fall into.
If it’s latish and you don’t like the idea of your to-​be-​mailed letters sitting in an outdoor mailbox on the sidewalk outside the post office, you can always bring them in here and trade prompt delivery for peace of mind.

TERRIBLE post office!

Very terrible service!!!
I am very upset… I just came back from this place. I was there to apply for a passport for my new born baby. As a requirement, both parents need to be present during the application. So we both (me and my wife) took off from work and drove to this location. There is a big sign saying passport applications are from 9am to 3 pm Mon to Fri. I was there at about 12:30pm, but the employee responsible for taking the application went to a 1 hour lunch break! WTF!
Worse than that. When I got there, by mistake I got into the passport office where they shoot face photos. So, the employee was there serving someone and she told me to go back to the front where she will meet me. So I went back, but guess what, she just took off for lunch! Very nice! This is what I call very terrible service. Hope people in charge see all the feedback about this location. Mostly 1 star.

If you can, go to a different location. No lines, just take a number and wait, and wait, and wait. Simple questions are not answered by signs, or employees, so if you don’t know exactly what you need… good luck. Customer service is very bad. Expect to ask a question and be treated horribly. Phyllis hates her life and the negativity oozes out of her regularly through out the day. It must be nice to know you cannot get fired.

Whatever you do… Don’t buy or cash a money order here. If they have no money… you will be told to come back later after standing in line for an hour.
Or maybe you’ll get lucky and have Ms. Phyllis give you dirty looks and tell you she’ll think about giving you your money, but you better not have an attitude towards her attitude or any type of personality at all, or gosh forbid you make direct eye contact with Ms. Phyllis cuz like the soup nazi she will send you away crying no money, no soup…
This post office really doesn’t deserve a star, but I felt nice and I did end up finally getting all of my money but I did have to shed a few tears first :(
Seriously, Ms. Phyllis is slow like an ass, and meaner than Judge Judy on a bad day and not at all fair or professional.
Now, I know all post offices are slow and have slow service. But this is literally the worst post office in the entire world. BTW, Ray Davis is the postmaster and I wonder if he knows how bad his post office is? Or because he is the boss could he be the real cause of Phyllis’ poor service skills.

Terrible service. Under staffed. Too crowded. Old Building. Avoid!

Horrible service! I was sending a prepaid box but wanted to make sure everything was «good to go.» I took a number but soon realized that I probably didn’t need to wait 20 min to make the drop off. I tried asking an employee who rudely dismissed my question, so instead, I continued waiting. When they finally called my number, the lady confirmed that my package was ready for mailing. I also asked her if I had needed to stand in the horribly inefficient line. She confirmed my suspicions that I should NOT have waited in line. Too bad the other lady was too rude to communicate that message to me. They hire the most incompetent people to work in these offices!

This post office has the poorest service I have ever witnessed. As the largest and busiest location, the line is always super long but they never seem to have enough staff on the clock to reduce overcrowding. Last August I shipped several boxes from LA to Berkeley and they took a month to arrive. I kept calling without getting any clear answers until I spoke with my mailman, Douglass Stuart. He was very rude and said that the inconvenience of bringing my packages to the third floor was what had prevented him from delivering the boxes. He then suggested that he will dump the boxes by the front lobby in an area where is dirty, and my belongings could have easily been seen and stolen.
Yesterday my visit to the service window was marked by a comment that a staff had shared with me about a colleague who was working next to her. I was fascinated by the civil rights stamps and wanted to buy them in bulk. The window staff then went searching everywhere and without any luck of finding them, she came back and said that they had run out. At that split second, the staff at the next window pointed to an obscure corner where these stamps were being kept. Upon handing me the stamps, she then told me under her breath, «that woman needs to go back to her own country», referring to her Latina colleague who had just helped her to locate the stamps. I was so shocked that I wondered if she had made any connections between her attitude toward her colleague and my purchase of stamps that has everything to do with the civil rights movement.
I then proceeded to tell her that I thought these stamps are special and that they must be in high demand. Although I was happy to receive my stamps of choice, I was also severely offended by her hateful comment. Putting the two stories together, I think USPS has a lot to work on in order to win back my confidence in their customer service.

The lines are always looooong – with this in mind, I’m not sure why they don’t beef up the staffing here. The service is sometimes ok, but there’s one staff member, an older African American dude, whose mission in life seems to be to make customers feel dumb and make it hard for them to pay to send mail. It would be nicer to have a PO Box here, but I went for a different branch because of the awful service. Blah.

I shouldn’t even be writing this expose.
There are some things that are so exclusive that you don’t even know they exist until they become part of your life. And for those in the know, they want to keep things that way. The Berkeley Post Office Box Annex is one of those exclusive clubs.
How exclusive? Most Bpobans (pronounced «bee-​PO-​bans») don’t even know each other. Identities are securely hidden in an undisclosed location.
If you’re in downtown Berkeley, undoubtedly you’ve walked by here a million times and not given it a second thought. You might have even seen Bpobans inside and still not wondered what they had in their lives that you didn’t. The window even has a sign on it, and yet that only adds to its anonymity.
I’m about to blow this den of secrecy wide open.
You don’t even need a key to get in this place. Since only Bpobans know about it, they leave the door unlocked. If you’re there, you belong there. If you’re not there, who cares about you?
When you enter the room, you’re struck by the institutional dullness of the place — nondescript government-​issue flooring, fluorescent lights — or so it would seem. You’re then faced with hundreds of identical tiny boxes. One of them is yours. They’re numbered with masking tape as though your box number could vanish at any moment.
Your key unlocks your box — unless your membership has become sullied. Your box, refilled by 11am every morning, contains a fluctuating grab bag of treasure and minutiae. Sometimes it even contains another key, this one shaped like one from a bus station locker, that goes to a corresponding larger box, also shaped like one from a bus station locker. Oh, this locker seems like it might be as banal as the one where the grey dog runs, but no: you’ve been redirected to this box because something too large and exciting to fit into your regular box has landed here. You don’t even get the key back — you must take your bounty and leave.
If there are other Bpobans present, conversation is kept to an absolute minimum. Bpobans must not know too much about each other — the entire operation could collapse under such a breach of secrecy.
I’ve already said way too much.