PACZKI or PĄCZKI?

I’m struggling to learn Polish. I love this story:

This weekend my family was doing a bookstore event related to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. One of the movie’s characters, Jacob Kowalski, dreams of becoming a baker, and arrives to a bank appointment with a suitcase full of Polish confections, including pączki, a sort of Polish jelly donut. My wife wanted to serve these at the event.

The little tail on the ą in pączki is a diacritical mark called an ogonek, which is Polish for “little tail”. If I understand correctly, this nasalizes the sound of the a so that it is more like /an/, and furthermore in modern Polish the value of this particular letter has changed so that pączki is pronounced something like “pawnch-kee”. (Polish “cz” is approximately like English “ch”.)
I was delegated to travel to Philadelphia’s Polish neighborhood to obtain the pączki. This turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The first address I visited was simply wrong. When I did find the bakery I was looking for, it was sold out of pączki. The bakery across the street was closed, so I started walking down Allegheny Avenue looking for the next bakery.

Before I got there, though, I passed a storefront with a sign listing its goods and services in blue capital letters. One of the items was PACZKI. Properly, of course, this should be PĄCZKI but Poles often omit the ogonek, especially when buying blue letter decals in Philadelphia, where large blue ogoneks are often unavailable. But when I went in to ask I immediately realized that I had probably made a mistake. The store seemed to sell toiletries, paper goods, and souvenirs, with no baked goods in sight.

I asked anyway: “Your sign outside says you sell PĄCZKI?”

“No,” replied the storekeeper. “Pach-kee.”

I thought she was correcting my pronunciation. “But I thought the ogonek made it ‘pawnch-kee’?”

“No, not pawnch-kee. Pach-kee. For sending, to Poland.” She pointed at a box.

I had misunderstood the sign. It did not say PĄCZKI, but PACZKI, which I have since learned means “boxes”.