Don't try to mail your taxes through Coachella's camp post office

Coachella campers, please stop trying to send in your tax retus through the Coachella campground’s post office.

At least 10 people tried in the first day of the aual music festival, according to Megan Hampton, the tiny post office’s quasi-post master.

“No, I can’t ‘just take it’,” Hampton said. “How do they have their taxes here? I don’t know.”

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It technically isn’t a real post office, more of an intermediary between festivalgoers and the real local post office, but there are plenty of oddities that people try, and sometimes succeed, in mailing.

The woman who tried to drop off the pre-paid package she sold on eBay didn’t make it. But the couple who sent out their wedding invites did.

“Someone dropped off wedding invitations last year that were already stamped,” Hampton said. “They wanted it to say Coachella on it.”

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Hampton has run the post office for the past two years, first in a sweltering tent and now in a cozy re-purposed art piece. This year, she is housed in a life-sized version of a Lincoln Log cabin, complete with the toy’s interlocking segments.

An artist put the cabin together as an exhibit for a Coachella gone-by, but now it’s where you go to mail merchandise back home, to taunt a friend with a Coachella-branded post card or to send Grandma a drunken letter. And yeah, campers actually do that.

Hampton said she’s not sure the addresses are always coherent enough to make it to their destination though. The letters and post cards don’t have retu addresses, so they can get stuck in a postal void if not written out carefully. For some, that might be a good thing.

Most of Hampton’s business comes from the $2 to $3 post cards that guests send domestically and inteationally to their friends and families. The post typically stays within the States, but it’s not rare for one to go to Dubai or Sweden because of Coachella’s inteational draw.

Hampton doesn’t peek at the post card’s message or destination, customers are just usually talkative, she said.

The post office’s other money maker is flat-rate boxes meant for shipping out Coachella merchandise. They don’t send packages inteationally though, because of the complications from Customs.

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Hampton got the gig after first working at a Coachella merchandise booth. She said she initially had to “hustle” to convince people to fill out post cards under the hot sun. But now, the Lincoln Log cabin is interesting and inviting enough to draw people in.

Just leave the taxes at home.