this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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:
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...
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.
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.
THAT you're right about, at least.
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.
If they added a clause somewhere that they could spin the service up again when deemed necessary, that'd be fine.
How will people receive their government IDs now? Or credit cards? Or postcards?
It's still vital to voting by mail but I reckon it's no use as democracies are soon obsolete