After 401 years, the Danish postal service has ended letter deliveries as the country fully embraces the digital age.
Truly a bizarre and ridiculous action. Publicly owned and operated postal delivery is still very useful, especially as late stage capitalism continues getting more and more dystopic.
Europe loves to clown on the US for a lack of social services, but the postal service is where it’s reversed. In almost all of Europe, postal services are provided by private companies, with no public option. I guess the US was created at just the right time to recognize the benefit of a government postal service (thanks, Ben Franklin).
Not France, not the Netherlands. Show me the stats on that claim?
In fact, are you American? 🙄
I am American, and not the previous commenter, but a quick Google and Wikipedia search seems to indicate that Germany, Denmark, The UK, Malta,
Sweden, Norway,and Finland have all privatized their mail services. The reddit posts from years ago about it seem to indicate that most of the people who remember the state owned service preferred the state owned post to private post services.So not all of Europe, but a decent amount of Western Europe seems to have privatized their post. I didn’t see anything about Spain, Portugal, Greece or Italy, but as I said it was a quick glance around.
According to Wikipedia the shared Swedish/Danish postal service is shared 60%/40% by the Swedish and Danish governments respectively, so im not sure how privatised it is really if it’s completely owned by government.
“The owners of PostNord Group are the state of Sweden (60 percent) and the Ministry of Transport of Denmark (40 percent).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord
PostNord (in Sweden at least) is partially privatized. It’s government owned and operates its own logistics network, but the customer facing side of it is privatized. Instead of dedicated post offices staffed by PostNord employees, you mail and pick up packages at partner businesses staffed by retail workers. In my experience these are usually gas stations, grocery stores and tobacco shops.
Fair enough, I was extrapolating from a comment from a Finn who indicated that they privatized their post and handed it over to PostNord
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As someone that’s lived in the US and Sweden, in my experience the US Postal Service is the only US government agency that’s better than its Swedish counterpart.
USPS runs tens of thousands of post offices staffed by its own workers, while PostNord has privatized its retail services and makes you mail stuff from gas stations and tobacco shops. USPS delivers mail AND packages to your home six days a week, while PostNord only delivers mail 2-3 days a week and makes you pick up your packages from their partner businesses. USPS offers “Informed Delivery” as a free service that emails you every morning with scanned images of the mail you’ll be receiving later in the day. You can renew your passport through USPS and they also offer some financial services.
I don’t even know what I would send in the mail. It’s pretty much just a coupon/junk delivery service at this point. Just get rid of it.
Can’t speak for everywhere or everyone, but my grandmother sure enjoys knowing when her hospital appointments are.
Yep. My aunt (in Sweden) still receives and pays all her bills by mail. She’s never been online, she doesn’t have an email account and she’s never owned a computer or a cell phone.
Useful for what? Wasting resources? Filling space in mail boxes that nobody checks because there’s never anything of interest in them?
Unless you mean having a postal service AT ALL, in which case you’re right but also misunderstood what they’re doing: they’re not ending ALL portal services, they’re just not wasting their resources on archaic snail mail letters anymore.
I highly doubt snail mail letters were a significant percentage of their deliveries.
They sure weren’t
Reading the article they went from 1.5b in 2000 to 110m last year. That doesn’t sound like an insignificant amount after all.
This sounds like a bad move.
While it sounds like a lot in a raw number,that’s not much for a population of 5.5million people for an entire year.
Besides, most of that was bills and correspondence from the government, things that have no reason for still being snail mail.
This sounds like a bad move.
Based on incomplete and misinterpreted data, sure. Based on the realities here in Denmark? Not really.
FYI, this is very similar to what is going on in Canada right now: the post is a crown corporation, meaning it’s a federal entity funded by the public through taxes and the carrier fees. Package delivery is their highest volume, but they have an exclusive right to letter mail. The government was debating axing the service, but the postal union pushed back hard with month long strikes.
The argument for axing the service has two flaws:
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corporations will fill in the gap: they will not. They will take over the service and monopolize it (or collude). And when it’s a necessity that people have to rely on, they will jack up prices and ask for government subsidy to keep it going. Basically all that was created was a middleman taking their cut…
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the service has to be profitable: it doesn’t. Government services don’t have to be profitable. Sure, it’s nice when they are, but that’s not the point of a service and the government can balance budget elsewhere, like selling energy for example. It’s infrastructure, not a business venture.
So yes, as the lady said, the world is watching for sure.
when it’s a necessity that people have to rely on
Which snail mail letters haven’t been for decades, making your objections hypothetical at best.
Everything that a snail mail letter can do, there’s a better and easier alternative. It’s the horse and buggy of correspondence.
the service has to be profitable: it doesn’t. Government services don’t have to be profitable
THAT you’re right about, at least.
So yes, as the lady said, the world is watching for sure.
And the reactions of those of us not stuck in the distant past range from celebration that this antediluvian system is finally considered obsolete to a complete lack of interest in whether or not something utterly superfluous that nobody has needed for decades will continue to be done.
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It’s still vital to voting by mail but I reckon it’s no use as democracies are soon obsolete
Letter mail still has a purpose. Email really can’t replace it. Sending bills to proprietary portals I need to sign into to see what I owe is ridiculous. Just one more app bro. It’s not an embrace of the digital age, it’s a tech utopian fantasy.
Flip phones with voice and text only - no data - plans put a wrench in the whole internet portal thing.
Unless of course it’s law to own a mobile device.
I usually get my bills in a PDF? You have to join sites to view them? I would hate that.
Email is both insecure and unreliable by design. I would never want to receive anything financially or legally important that way. As a notification option, sure, but not the only way.
Emails can be end to end encrypted.
People can be honest and forthcoming too but you don’t design a system around that assumption.
Did you just call Email unreliable ?? I live in a clown world.
Or you know nothing about email.
If it helps you sleep at night https://e-mail.wtf/
This will last as long as reliable electricity and internet access does.
Thing is, it’s going to create a historical hole in future archeological studies of this era, as the messages within digital devices are ephemral. Texts of today, unlike handwritten letters stand a slim chance of being a tangible artifact in 200 years.
Que sera…
This will last as long as reliable electricity and internet access does.
As will modern society.
Like stage coaches and telegraphs before them, snail mail letters are obsolete relics of a less convenient past.
Conveience is overrated and it fosters short-sightedness.
Don’t be caugt up in the whizz-bang of energy dependency. In a power generation crisis situation the trivial stuff will be lost.
Texting links to TikTok of some cat jumping into a bird feeder isn’t gonna survive. Sending your grandparents a snail-mail letter describing what you’re doing just might.
When you have less life left in front of you, making a mark or leaving a mark on the world behind you takes on a different hue. EVERYONE - even you, will get to that point.
It’s basic human nature.
I occasionally send a snail mail, and it’s much more heartwarming to receive a handwritten letter than an email, so I don’t think it is obsolete :(
Are they? They’re sure great for those who can’t use electronic forms of communication.
They still mail packages, right? Why end delivering letters? They’re just small packages.
In the year 2000, PostNord delivered nearly 1.5 billion letters. Last year, it delivered 110 million.
Makes sense when you really think about it. U.S. letter mail is mostly junk.
Canada post office has a standard letter being no more than 50g.
So 5.5 mil kg. That is a lot to carry.
I would hate it bc it makes the apps that companies make more enticing; which makes data collecting more profittable. So yeah.
I don’t know if it’s them getting worse or just I’m reading more news about them but the Danes kind of seem to suck.
Not as much as you do though.
What else have you seen about them?
Isn’t snail mail the last legally protected communication?
The US needs to ban mail immediately.
Thankfully that would require an amendment to The Constitution, so it will never happen.
No, the Republicans will just keep crippling it until it’s near useless.
You say that as if the Constitution even matters anymore.
Getting a letter then will be all that much more special and or romantic. Unless it’s jury duty.
The generation that cant email, text or videocall are dying out. The fact is that everyone laments this, wrings their hands, calls it an outrage and then doesnt send a letter or christmas card ever and already gets all of their bills via email. They love the idea of mail.
Yeah, it is a pretty bizarre comment section. Mostly based on complete ignorance of the situation as well.
It’s a really good infrastructure to have as a fallback.
There will still be physical letter delivery, just not by the original historical mail service anymore.
And I’m guessing its some corpo shit, right?
Oh this is not going to end well
In the US you can’t even unsubscribe from the usps according to my letter carrier and their website. I’ve tried just never getting the mail but they end up bundling it up and sticking it in front of your front door.
Here’s what you do. Dig the sidewalk down 50 feet. Just a sudden drop. 200 foot tall fence made of barbed wire and spiked metal. This reaches all the way to the 50 foot drop of the sidewalk.
The sidewalk is public property. So if he throws it down there, it’s littering.
The fence is also electrified. Your mailbox is on the front porch. Thete’s also random landmines in the yard, and swinging chainsaws being whirled around by pulleys.
Lets see him deliver those weekly savers ads now!
Clearly you aren’t familiar with the mail carrier’s oath.
When society collapses, the human population is at a historic low, and evil warlords stake claim to swathes of wasteland, The Postman can still be seen riding off into the horizon, for nothing will keep them from their assigned route.
Wait, the US doesn’t have a free service to (a) remove you from postal spam lists and (b) stop spam being delivered?
In the UK, I registered my address on a few of the things listed here ( https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/post-and-parcels/stop-getting-junk-mail/ ). And the only junk mail I now receive are political flyers & takeout menus delivered outside of the postal service (ie by people, not posties).
Do Americans really have to put up with receiving random bullshit with no easy way of stopping it?!
Not really, no, because between letter and bulk mail mailbox delivery, the USPS derives much more revenue from bulk mail.
But, because most people just trash it, most companies have also stopped sending it.
Well, no… but why refuse junk mail?
That’s a resource being sent to you.
It’s ok to work out how to use it. Those junk flyers make great barbecue starters, birdcage or catbox liners, packing for when you ship an item, the unprinted backsides of the letters are good to use for shopping lists and small to do notes…
Local grade schools can sometime use the junk mail newsprint for kids arts classes when they have paper mache projects (I’ve called to ask if they have needs of anything and ended up dropping off reams of that to my nearby school’s art teacher…)
The rest of it goes straight away into a dedicated paper recycling bin.
(I even take those ubiquitous plastic shopping bags to the Walmart drop off bins for them.)
I don’t refuse junk mail. I indicate my preference to not have it printed on paper, sent some distance, and hand delivered. I refuse it at the origin, not the destination.
Worst case, the postal service recycles it at origin instead of having to ship it.Junk mail is junk.
It isn’t a resource.
I don’t think I’ve ever received something that meaningfully contributes towards a purchase that I actually want to make.
I buy what I need. I find what I want, I think about if I actually need it, I find local manufacturers, I find local suppliers.
I see if the price difference between local & inter/national is worth the saving (most of the time, it isn’t and I’d rather buy from a local manufacturer or supplier, even at twice the price).
Then I decide if I should buy something.Some paper shipped across the country and shoved through my letterbox is not going to influence my decision AT ALL.
In fact, it’s more likely to negatively impact my purchasing decision.
Because here is a company that has excess profits to physical cold-advertise something to me, regardless if I have an interest in it or not.
What a waste of money, resources and time.Some paper shipped across the country and shoved through my letterbox is not going to influence my decision AT ALL.
Oh, you and I are identical in that respect. Hate people trying to sell me shit. Am firmly from the “Don’t call us, we’ll call you…” department.
God’s honest, in my late 20’s I made the decision to turn my head when ads came on the TV, (refused to view them at all) and by the late 90’s when high speed internet rolled out, we cut the cord.
No cable TV by 1999. Fully gone.
Within a few years, I’d found out how to use a hosts file (Dan Pollock’s - it’s still available) and blocked as much of the ad content I could on the computer. Now I’m rolling with uBO. (and still have Dan’s hosts file enabled within it.)
My only exception is for food.
Where I live, we get lots of local grocery store flyers that are still printed on heavyweight newsprint so I’ll often check out the produce sections or meat specials… but that’s about it.
Then those go into a stack that either goes to recycling or off to the schools or shops that use the paper - gladly - to pack merchandise for shipping. (bubble wrap has gotten ridiculously priced in the last few years)
The rest gets converted into notepaper or recycled.
I thought I heard of a program many years back, but I haven’t been able to find it recently. I’d even pay a small fee.
Might make their own commute and other errands outside of their property SLIGHTLY more difficult, though. Just a bit.
Sucks to be a DNM user in Denmark
Not what anybody was talking about.
