Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times (bbc.com) 78
Denmark's PostNord will end centuries of letter delivery as digitalization and high postage costs make physical mail nearly obsolete. The BBC reports: The steep decline in letter volumes has been driven largely by digitalization, and PostNord announced in March that it will cease letter services at the end of the year. It will bring to an end four centuries of letter deliveries by the state-owned operation. A third of its workforce is being let go, as it sheds 2,200 positions in its loss-making letter arm. Instead it will focus on its profitable parcel business, creating 700 new roles. "Danes hardly receive any letters anymore. It's been going down for years and years," says Kim Pedersen, chief of PostNord Denmark. "They're receiving one letter a month on average, it's not a lot." "On the contrary, Danes love to shop online," he adds. "Global e-commerce is growing significantly, and we are moving with it."
Fifteen years ago, PostNord operated several enormous letter-sorting facilities, but now there's just one on the western outskirts of Copenhagen. Since 2000, the volume of letters the business handles has declined by more than 90%, from around 1.4 billion to 110 million last year, and it continues to fall rapidly. As PostNord prepares to cease letter deliveries, 1,500 of its red post boxes are being removed from Danish streets. However, few locals in the capital appear to use them much.
From email and cashless mobile payments, to digital health cards carried by smartphone, there's an app for almost everything in Denmark - and it's one of the world's most digitalized nations, second only to South Korea, according to the OECD's 2023 Digital Government Index. The Danish government has embraced a "digital by default" policy, and for more than a decade correspondence with the public has been carried out electronically. "We are facing this natural evolution of a digitalized society, earlier than maybe some other countries," Mr Pedersen explains. "In Denmark, we are maybe five or 10 years ahead."
The high cost of sending a letter in Denmark is also a contributing factor behind its decline. In 2024, a new law opened up the postal market to private competition and took away its exemption from the country's 25% rate of VAT, so the price of a PostNord stamp jumped to 29 Danish krone ($4.55) per letter. "That made [volumes] drop even further faster," Mr Pedersen points out. The report notes that private firm DAO will take over nationwide letter deliveries in Denmark after PostNord exits. However, concerns remain that elderly citizens and rural residents may struggle with fewer post boxes and reduced service quality. Both the advocacy group DaneAge and the 3F Postal Union warn the transition could disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.
Fifteen years ago, PostNord operated several enormous letter-sorting facilities, but now there's just one on the western outskirts of Copenhagen. Since 2000, the volume of letters the business handles has declined by more than 90%, from around 1.4 billion to 110 million last year, and it continues to fall rapidly. As PostNord prepares to cease letter deliveries, 1,500 of its red post boxes are being removed from Danish streets. However, few locals in the capital appear to use them much.
From email and cashless mobile payments, to digital health cards carried by smartphone, there's an app for almost everything in Denmark - and it's one of the world's most digitalized nations, second only to South Korea, according to the OECD's 2023 Digital Government Index. The Danish government has embraced a "digital by default" policy, and for more than a decade correspondence with the public has been carried out electronically. "We are facing this natural evolution of a digitalized society, earlier than maybe some other countries," Mr Pedersen explains. "In Denmark, we are maybe five or 10 years ahead."
The high cost of sending a letter in Denmark is also a contributing factor behind its decline. In 2024, a new law opened up the postal market to private competition and took away its exemption from the country's 25% rate of VAT, so the price of a PostNord stamp jumped to 29 Danish krone ($4.55) per letter. "That made [volumes] drop even further faster," Mr Pedersen points out. The report notes that private firm DAO will take over nationwide letter deliveries in Denmark after PostNord exits. However, concerns remain that elderly citizens and rural residents may struggle with fewer post boxes and reduced service quality. Both the advocacy group DaneAge and the 3F Postal Union warn the transition could disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.
Did they consider making snail mail better? (Score:2)
Just asking for a friend without an email address...
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But it's a fundamentally unfair competition because email was inadvertently designed to pretend it was free. In the form of a joke, I blame Al Gore for telling them not to worry about the money. Or maybe a worse joke to compare it to nuclear power, which was supposed to produce electricity that would be too cheap to meter...
The real cost of email isn't economic, however. It's attention. So I say convicted spammers should receive prison sentences long enough for them to REAL all of the spam they sent. Out lo
Making snail mail better (Score:2)
There are ways.
I take a picture on my phone. I want to send it as a postcard to my parents. So I open 'Photos', select the picture and forward it to my dad's 'TelePost' profile. I may add a video note, annotating and commenting on the picture; my face appearing inset in the corner.
The next day, my dad gets the postcard. Flipping the picture over, he reads the first couple of sentences from my voice note printed next to a QR code. He then scans the card with his TelePost app and views the video note.
Dad may
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Okay, I confess that this time I deliberately grabbed for the FP because I have something to say and I was able to figure out a short joke version using the same Subject. Yeah, it's a lame joke, but y'all should know me by now. I couldn't make a good joke if I read a 500-page textbook on humor. (It's called Getting the Joke by Oliver Double. Second edition of what must be the primary textbook of his university class on standup comedy, though he makes it clear the most important part of the course is the i
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Okay, I confess that this time I deliberately grabbed for the FP because I have something to say and I was able to figure out a short joke version using the same Subject. Yeah, it's a lame joke, but y'all should know me by now. I couldn't make a good joke if I read a 500-page textbook on humor. (It's called Getting the Joke by Oliver Double. Second edition of what must be the primary textbook of his university class on standup comedy, though he makes it clear the most important part of the course is the impractical part.)
Now for my typically crazy solution approach. Did Denmark consider making snail mail better by linking email addresses to physical addresses? As I imagine it, it should be an opt-in system with defaults against bulk mail--and of course STRONG security defenses against spammer abuse. The sociopathic spammers love harvesting any source of validated email addresses.
So the basic idea would be to register your email address on the official website that links it to your snail mail address. Fundamental design is one-way, but if the mail scanner sees an email address, then it can print a little address sticker and cover up the email address. (Of course you could register more email addresses if you want to.) Once a year the post office would send a confirmation snail mail to make sure the snail mail is still valid and to remind you of the registration. (But I think the confirmations should be randomized in a way to optimize the confirmations without overloading the carriers at one time.)
Default would be first-class or registered mail only, though I suppose some people would want an option to permit bulk snail mail, too. I sure wouldn't, but some people are crazy... And physical spam has never been the same kind of problem as spam email because the marginal cost can't pretend to be zero.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot axe grinding? My axe has done been ground?
I'm trying to see the use-case and also how it would increase letter volume and also how doing so isn't the environmentally wrong direction in the first place. So help me out.
You're saying that say... I go to a restaurant and they're like "would you like our weekly coupons mailed to you", you could give them your e-mail address instead of your street address, and you'd get the coupons. Right? Why wouldn't you just have them e-mail you? Or... your sister moves to another city and wants to write you a l
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Thank you for your question, but you wasted your time with the straw men responses.
My bad for assuming the main use case was so obvious. You know an email address and want to send that person some physical document or package. You could just use the email address. More convenient, so more likely people would send the snail mail, thereby increasing the volume of snail mail.
Disappointed the story got no Funny so I'll add a joke. "You could even send them a card, but please NOT a Hallmark card because Hallmark
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Thank you for your question, but you wasted your time with the straw men responses.
What?
My bad for assuming the main use case was so obvious. You know an email address and want to send that person some physical document or package. You could just use the email address.
So... what I said. The sender is putting an e-mail address on something instead of a street address. Also - and I repeat - packages are not the issue. The issue is letter mail volume.
More convenient, so more likely people would send the snail mail, thereby increasing the volume of snail mail.
How? How is this more convenient? It's all fine and dandy to present a conclusion without evidence or explanation as fact, but it isn't convincing. Where is the use-case where you want me to send you a letter, but you are only providing me an e-mail address, not a street address? More, how do you figure there's a pent-up demand where people just aren't getting letters they want because providing a street address is just overwhelmingly arduous?
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NAK
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Z^-1
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You know an email address and want to send that person some physical document or package. You could just use the email address. More convenient, so more likely people would send the snail mail, thereby increasing the volume of snail mail.
I don't see how this would significantly increase snail mail volume. If I need the physical address of somebody today, I can just send them an email to ask. So the volume would basically stay the same.
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What part of the word "convenience" don't you understand? I'm just counting the steps in the algorithm and I think one is less than three. Also no time delay.
Or maybe I can't understand what you mean by "significantly"?
But actually you reminded me of another advantage of this suggestion: Security of keeping the physical addresses out of email systems of variable levels of security. One of those cases of "keeping your eggs in one basket and watching that basket carefully".
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I sure feel like I have failed to communicate here... From your description is sounds quite inconvenient, whereas the focus of my suggestion is to make it more convenient. All you would need to send the letter is the first-class stamp and an email address.
What you are describing sounds more like a telegram, but I don't even know the details how how addresses were handled for telegrams. In the old books they just assume the telegrams are getting delivered somehow. Typical delivery times seemed to be a few ho
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Just asking for a friend without an email address...
How much better could it be? I live in a country where next day delivery is assured, post is cheap to send, and mail boxes are within a couple of minutes walk of every house. STILL we don't send letters.
I have an idea of how to make it better. We could digitise it. Yeah. Use a computerised system and send the mail over the internet. It's sounds like if someone invented that it would really take off, people may even stop sending letters.
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My bad and see the other responses if you care why.
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Just asking for a friend without an email address...
They could just do like the US does. We get so god damned much junk mail every day that there's no way the postal service would ever end letter sending. Advertising basically keeps the postal service in business over here. People think I'm joking when I say we're an advertising based economy, but this shit is literally the foundation of everything we do and everything we have as a country.
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What would Bill Hicks say?
postal letter drop (Score:3)
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Daily deliveries should not be needed. Once or twice a week should work for most people.
Agreed, though bill/reply due dates would need to be adjusted accordingly to account for the slower delivery schedule
For those who want next day or packages use one the other next day services.
FedEx and UPS, etc... are not required to deliver to every/any address, like USPS is.
USPS should be letter only, No bulk mail, no occupant mail.
Senders have to pay for those to be delivered, so they generate revenue. Still, seems like once a week for those would be fine - a dedicated junk mail day, perhaps.
Re:postal letter drop (Score:5, Insightful)
FedEx and UPS, etc... are not required to deliver to every/any address, like USPS is.
This is the key point. The universal service obligation (USO), i.e., the requirement to deliver to every address in the entire country for the same price, is the key distinguishing feature of a national mail service. It's also the key reason why the USPS struggles to compete with other delivery services that do not have a USO and therefore can cherry pick the most profitable services. It's also why it's unreasonable to criticize the USPS for not competing better with companies that don't have such onerous government regulation.
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It's also the key reason why the USPS struggles to compete with other delivery services
The USPS has far more reason why they are struggling. Legislation exists which is designed for them to fail, such as the requirement to pre-fund all potential future retirements for staff they haven't even hired yet, worse they are required to provide defined benefits whereas everyone else is permitted to do a standard defined contribution scheme.
The USPS is treated differently to most companies because republicans have been actively attempting to kill it.
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Looks like that the retirement pre-fund for 75 years had been removed a couple years ago: https://apwu.org/news/postal-s... [apwu.org]
Doesn't invalidate your post; Republicans have been trying to kill the USPS so that mail delivery can be privatized for a while now.
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You guys should get a modern banking system so bills don't get delivered by mail.
That would eat into the executive bonus pool at the banks. No can do.
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USPS should be letter only, No bulk mail, no occupant mail.
So you want to tank the USPS? The total annual revenue for the post office is $80 billion. Bulk mail accounts for $15 billion of that.
Re: postal letter drop (Score:2)
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Bulk mail is where USPS makes what money they make. Drop that, and they're bankrupt within a year.
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While I doubt the US could do this, there should however be an adjustment to how and when postal mail is delivered. Daily deliveries should not be needed. Once or twice a week should work for most people.
Canada needs to do this too. Postal unions are making restructuring very difficult.
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I just don't know how Canada Post can hand out raises when profits are falling. There aren't enough Golden parachutes for all union employees.
It's all bizarre to me.
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I think Canada Post is going to go the way of Denmark....not if but when.
I sure hope so. I have no problem with good union jobs and benefits, but the 1950s business model just has to go. I get this picture of the union leaders sitting home every evening after dinner watching Leave it to Beaver reruns with their tradwife and then driving to the union hall in the morning in their father's Oldsmobile.
That the union members seem to be following along also makes me shake my head. Maybe they just want to suck everything out that they can before it all comes falling down. I hope
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How else will I get five trees worth of daily junk mail to power my incinerator?
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I've thought this for years. Even if they just reduce it to us getting mail 5 days a week it would streamline scheduling as that's how many days a week their workers work. Small things like that in aggregate would save some money even beyond the savings of being closed an extra day.
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While I doubt the US could do this...
USPS cannot be ended without a constitutional amendment.
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I've mostly seen this ridiculous argument used by people trying to figure out how to prop up the postal service to protect union jobs.
They also come up with all sorts of things unrelated to mail delivery that USPS "could" do to survive. The most common one is to "provided banking services" (usually including loans - so USPS would be in the credit business and have to deal with collections and bankruptcy). Since there are far fewer post offices than there are other physical banking locations that provide ban
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I think the argument is more around rural areas, where there aren't a bunch of banks where there are currently post offices. I still don't really see the appeal, but I go by probably 4 post offices in small towns that don't have a bank, or maybe have one bank on a trip to my "local" Sam's Club.
However, for "reasons" many government tasks still need us to mail things in to them, as do a bunch of small businesses (still only take physical checks, or charge a fee to take a digital payment). Maybe this is just
Cost Kills (Score:2)
While I doubt the US could do this
I bet it could if it increased the cost to send a basic letter to $4.55. With prices like that I'd argue that cost is a bit more than just a "contributing factor".
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Oh, I'm sure they'll do it right after they switch to metric and get rid of 1 cent coins. Funnily enough, of the two letters I've received in the last month or two, both were from the US. Both should have been an email.
Come to think of it, one of them was an email, but they sent a letter as well for people who don't have one of those newfangled computer things yet.
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Once or twice a week should work for most people.
Except for the people who would have to deliver three times as much mail per day for 1/3 as much pay.
Running it into the ground (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like just a desperate cost-cutting measure to me.
They can blame digital mail all they want but the background is that PostNord, and especially the Danish part of it, is infamous for having been severely mismanaged and bleeding money for many years.
Unfortunately, the Danish service had merged with the privatised former Swedish postal service, so the Danish arm is dragging down the Swedish one as well. They are still delivering letters in Sweden but now only every other day.
Because of how crappy it has become (in more than one way), it has the nickname "PostMord" ("Post murder") over here.
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This is a breakdown from DHL on letter prices in Europe on page 7 https://group.dhl.com/content/... [dhl.com]
Denmark was three times more expensive than Sweden and twice as expensive as Norway, a country notorious for its high costs.
I'm not surprised that the general population of Denmark was not willing to put up with this.
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Denmark was three times more expensive than Sweden
Ironically for your point Denmark and Sweden share THE SAME POSTAL SERVICE. That means that the cost difference has nothing to do with management of the postal service and is entirely the result of regulations. They are both run by PostNord, and PostNord is only winding up the Danish side of the service.
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They can blame digital mail all they want but the background is that PostNord, and especially the Danish part of it, is infamous for having been severely mismanaged and bleeding money for many years.
There are postal services around the world that are not mismanaged and yet are also bleeding money. Yes digital mail is a MASSIVE root cause. Try run a business with defined requirements creating effectively fixed costs instead of variable ones when the primary source of revenue is drying up.
multiple-delivery-per-day history in USA (Score:1)
On a somewhat-related note, many cities had multiple mail deliveries per day to residences in the first half of the 20th century and for businesses well into the last half.
Daily Deliveries Down to One - 1950 [si.edu]
Also, A Short History of Home Mail Delivery [psmag.com] (ignore the bit about Saturday delivery ending in 2013 in the USA, it didn't end).
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We still have them in my neighborhood. Possibly only for high priority mail. But they do run through here twice daily (once on Saturdays).
Wait Wait Wait (Score:2)
If the task still needs doing and a private company is taking on the mantle, as well as the fact that Post Nord will continue with parcel delivery, that means that this is not about digitization and obsolescence of snail mail. This is about cost cutting and nothing else.
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How do they get boxes? (Score:3)
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I also don't get it. What is clear to me is the postal service is usually very underpriced. I'm not from Denmark, but in the places I know the price range is 1-2 euros for a letter post stamp. They can't pay the postman walking around around the neighbourhood with such prices. A private service, say DHL, does it for approx 7 euros in my place (which is already very very cheap).
It would be understandable if the postal services raised the prices to say 5 euros, or equate the price of private courier. Of cours
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Hope US does not follow (Score:2)
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As long the tax payers are fine with it not being user-pays, and instead being almost entirely tax payer funded.
Nothing stopping people sending you cards via UPS or Fedex. I'm sure USPS has courier services too.
Past time run the USA too. (Score:2)
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Shame we don't have Internet coverage everywhere. Or the USPS could just take a page from the telecoms playbook: "Sorry. We don't serve that neighborhood. Deal with it."
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Starlink covers all of the country.
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Thank goodness all of the country is wealthy enough to afford it.
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Where are you taking that goalpost?
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Right up to the front door of the FCC with a Starlink application in one hand and an RDOF request in the other.
Spam (Score:2)
I currently have 671 unread emails.
They're unheard because probably all but 5 or 6 of them are spam.
If I got that kind of useless bullshit with phone calls, I'd have to abandon phone service.
Physical letter service is important.
Official Digital Mailboxes (Score:2)
Physical letter services can be replaced though. In Scandinavia, we have official digital mailboxes for important documents (government and businesses). It's not email, but another type of service.
Only certain types of private businesses (banks, insurance, etc) and government agencies can send you messages. Spammers and scammers are not able to send messages at all.
The mailboxes are free, but operated by private companies. You can only read the messages on the Web, or in the official app. You must use an of
This is the correct move (Score:2)
I wish the US would follow suit. Nothing comes from the post office but junk mail.
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I get useful, valuable or wanted mail delivered by USPS all the time.
I recently invested around $400 to help ensure the safety of mail that is delivered to my house. I got a Mailboss Package Master, matching metal post, 4x4, concrete and a few other things. It should last for mail, many years and is the best mailbox on the street!
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Cold weather is coming soon. Don't forget to order a load of coal.
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I'd love to have a load of coal!
Sadly, I have no concept one way to burn it );
lies it's all lies (Score:2)
"Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries"
"private firm DAO will take over nationwide letter deliveries"
Really? (Score:2)
No funny here. Sad.