Why we created this website

This problem has been disruptive and expensive for us. Now we have to deal with:

• Lost personal mail
• Lost holiday cards
• Lost business correspondence
• Lost bills and late payments, resulting in harm to our credit
• Lost tax documents
• Loss of reputation when our customers or people we correspond with get mail back marked "return to sender"
• Possible loss of customer payments (checks)
• Need to print new checks, business cards and other stationary
• Need to inform customers and friends of our new address
• Need to do a change of address for businesses, including banks, government entities, domain registration, voter registration, DMV, etc
• This is a business mailing address, so, per postal regulations, we can't submit a change of address form

I went with what I thought was a stable and professional service to avoid having to go through any of those problems.

Contracting mail receiving services truly is a case of caveat emptor, "let the buyer beware". There is no practical legal remedy. MBE Inc. would not take any action. If the service is provided incompetently and the service buyer is harmed, there's nothing to be done about it, except in cases where the harm is documented direct financial harm big enough to sue over ($10k and up, practically). "Buyer beware" only works when the buyer is aware, and we wish we had been aware of the business practices of this franchise earlier. Now future buyers will be aware of what my experience was.

Remember that you can't submit a change of address request with the postal service for a business address such as an MBE franchise. This means that if the mailbox service is unreliable, and you decide to change, you'll have to rely on them to forward your mail! In this case we won't even ask them to forward the mail, for obvious reasons. The best we can do is dilligently and quickly change all of our address records.

In future we will look for services which have contracts with guarantee clauses and defined remedies, called liquidated damages. We wouldn't buy a car without a warranty and a service plan, and the same should apply to mailbox service.

According to this story in the Washington Post, Angry Customers Use Web to Shame Firms, because there are no practical legal remedies for small breaches of contract. Companies with brand names like MBE should stand behind the quality of their services, and sites like this one will help consumers make informed decisions.