20 years of online shopping and a whole industry excited to collect data and autofill and address checking functions STILL mess up apartments.
The system is set up to work well with houses, but there is no consensus on if "apartment/suite" should be a separate field or not... and it's also still often rendered wrong, and makes bad suggestions such as "correcting"
123ABC to 123Abc
Granted when I worked in database design this was my "thing" so I'm hypercritical ... but still.
I get personally offended because I suspect that it's some kind of American suburban-centric mentality that makes apartments an afterthought.
The correct answer is that "apartment suite" should be a separate field NOT tacked on to the street address, but in most renderings it should be on the same line with a comma.
And you need to deftly separate this information if the user tries to enter it in the address line.
ANYWAY.
And yet that may just replace machine-encoded biases with human-habit biases:
https://hcommons.social/@beadsland/114829262094497808
To be clear, in Usia, building numbers appear at the beginning of the line, where unit numbers appear at the end. In Germany, building number appears at the end of the line.
So now you, as a German shipper, prepare a routing label for a Usian address that ends with a unit number. You're given a freeform multi-line text field, but the courier wants specific fields. What ends up in the building number field depends on how cognizant you are of the difference between German and Usian addressing practices.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Once had something shipped to me from Germany that got caught in a USPS mail loop because the shipper was confused by my unit number, and used it for the building number on the routing label, insisting all the while that they had reproduced my address exactly as given to them.
If anyone asked me how addresses should be written it go a little like this:
Earth, USA, Some City, 12345
1234 Some Street, Apartment Six
Floor Five, Department of Things
Person Name
But... noooooo
Yes you have to write "Earth" every time. It's for perspective.
Local Group, Milky Way, Sol System
Earth...
myrmepropagandist
Roger BW 😷
sport of sacred spherical cows
Landa 