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Danish postal service to stop delivering letters
- ursAxZA 10mo agoWe keep optimizing systems, but human life doesn’t necessarily optimize along with them. When a society becomes fully efficient, people start craving the slow, the physical, the intentional.
- FarmerPotato 10mo agoFifty years ago, I was given a coin bank styled after the red Danish Post letter box. That was in Solvang, CA. As these Danish immigrant-character communities (look also in Elkhorn, Racine, Greenville, etc) are little time capsules, you may have to travel to America to find a replica red slot to drop your letter. The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract. EDIT: maybe Royal Mail was never the Danish term, but I thought it was on a Lego set too...
- bigfatkitten 10mo agoSo if I’m in Denmark and I want to send my friend a piece of paper with something written on it, what happens now? I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.
- CrossVR 10mo agoFrom the article: > Danes will still be able to send letters, using the delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark but will expand its services from 1 January from about 30m letters in 2025 to 80m next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao shop to post their letters – or pay extra to have it collected from home – and pay for postage either online or via an app.
- userbinator 10mo agoIn other words they've just privatised the mail service.
- clickety_clack 10mo agoWith a monopoly no less.
- cr125rider 10mo agoNatural monopolies with no guard rails always end poorly
- xnx 10mo agoIs letter/parcel delivery a natural monopoly? I think of systems with hard infrastructure that use the public way like roads, rail, and pipes.
- clickety_clack 10mo agoI think the question is whether a competitor can become established. Can you run a mail delivery service if you only have local coverage? I don’t know. In the past, maybe you could use the national postal service to fill in the gaps as you scale up a delivery network, but I can’t see the established monopoly giving bulk discounts to a potential competitor. Trucks, vans, sorting facilities and workforces are very expensive to set up, and once they’re set up you can basically optimize them month by month etc. A new competitor has to speculatively spend an awful lot of money before they can deploy anything in any optimal way.
- toast0 10mo agoParcel delivery is clearly not a natural monopoly; there are several carriers, including some that only have a limited footprint. I don't see why you couldn't expand from parcels to letters; although economics would probably be tough.
- bill38 10mo agoIn Denmark the physical post offices have been closed since a few years (cost reduction). Even stamps aren't printed anymore (you have to pay online to get a code that you print or write on the letter or parcel).
- grugagag 10mo agoMail will arrive straight at the museum
- WalterBright 10mo agoIt's been decades since I wrote a letter and mailed it.
- petra303 10mo agoWhich makes taking the time to send a letter have a lot of importance. I wrote a note to my mother and it meant a lot to her to get a hand written correspondence.
- kingofmen 10mo agoHow long has it been since you needed to mail a physical document to a bank, a government department, or something similar?
- dijit 10mo agoI live in Sweden, and I can confidently say... Once. As in, literally as long as I've lived here (11 years now) I mailed one thing by post and it was, somewhat ironically, a self-assessment form for an ADHD diagnosis from a company called Modigo. I have received a lot of mail though, from the government also, so I'm not sure how that is gonna fly.
- WalterBright 10mo agoI mail documents frequently, but not letters.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoI mailed in my taxes last April, as I always have.
- TiredOfLife 10mo agoIn 40+ years. Never
- Nextgrid 9mo agoThere are plenty of services that will accept a PDF and turn it into a letter. There's other services that can do the reverse. Those combined means you can interact with entities expecting physical documents without ever having to actually handle physical paper.
- jmclnx 10mo agoSo, all they did was privatize their postal service. There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company. I doubt this will end well, but Denmark is a small country so maybe it will work. After a year it would be nice to see stats and compare delivery time, lost mail, cost between Dao and the old service,
- dmix 10mo agoIt was already a corporate entity running it, just one owned by both Swedish and Denmark governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord?wprov=sfti1# It is still the 2nd largest company in Sweden. They just gave up on Denmarks mail contract after the vast majority of people stopped sending mail and now another company is taking over the much smaller operation.
- hulitu 10mo ago> There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company. They shall do it like in the energy sector: one company who takes it from the sender, one to transport it and one to deluver it to the receiver. /s
- bingo-bongo 10mo agoIt’s been privatized for the past 15 years or so. It’s just change of contractor.
- foolserrandboy 10mo agoWill companies be willing to pay more to send junk mail if it is no longer largely subsidized? In this regard it could be a good thing assuming they don’t already have a regulation against junk mail there.
- reloadtak 10mo ago[dead]
- arbirk 10mo agoJust to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms: Under law: DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring). But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore. Under government contract: DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail. Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service. The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"
- dmix 10mo agoAnd the reason the existing public corporation shut down service in Denmark > citing a 90% decline in letter mail since 2000
- kimos 10mo agoCanada Post is in financial crisis for similar reasons.
- expedition32 10mo agoIn the Netherlands the post office is contractually obliged to deliver mail but they are LOSING money on it. Even the government themselves went full digital... Personally I think that if people think post services are a national priority it should be subsidised with tax money. Cannot expect a private company to burn money.
- dmix 10mo agoCanada Post is losing money on parcel delivery, not just regular mail. They are pretty awful as a service (for anything serious at least) and are constantly going on strike, so everyone is flocking to private competition. I've had 3 different packages end up in a purgatory in 2 different strikes and now I use Fedex instead. Which is funny because parcel delivery has only grown over the last decade while Canada Post loses more and more money, while their union workers are demanding pay raises and job security.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoWhen this came up earlier in the month (Denmark gets ready to cancel Christmas cards https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-ready-to-cancel-christmas-cards https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-rea... ) it seemed more like PostNord was just stepping back opening the market up to other 'rivals' to continue service.
- Beijinger 10mo agoThere is nothing worse, than a rotten mail delivery system: https://expatcircle.com/cms/underrated-quality-of-life-indicator-reliability-of-postal-services/ https://expatcircle.com/cms/underrated-quality-of-life-indic... Many USPS outlets seem to be run down. But in my experience, mail delivery is pretty solid. And there is indeed a country without postal mail service. Panama!
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoPreviously when it was announced earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278934
- usr1106 10mo agoSlightly related: In Finland all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default starting Jan 1st, 2026. There is the possibility to opt out. I am not convinced this is a wise direction. When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications. Yes, even elections are stored offshore.
- Jhsto 10mo agoCounterpoint: because most Finns think about Russian interference, the likelihood there's a tentative plan is high. Or you know, they call you. And in a country of 5m people, you can probably ask someone, who knows someone else, who knows whoever has that information in the government.
- usr1106 10mo agoYou can ask someone who asks someone who is in the voting register or what taxes to pay? Not convinced. 5 million are more than 50.
- hulitu 10mo ago> When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications. Do you route all your mail through other countries ?
- pseudalopex 10mo ago> all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default
- SilverElfin 10mo agoI know some people are mentioning a private provider who will be around. But they will charge a lot I’m sure, and this will continue to kill the practice of writing letters or sending greeting cards. It’s a bit sad knowing people will forget the value of a personal touch, and they’ll not know what they lost when all they do is send each other a text message or whatever.
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
- mkroman 10mo agoWhat I don't see mentioned here or in the article: PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed. The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.
- Aeolun 10mo agoDenmark is tiny though? Why does it cost $5 per letter?
- jacobgorm 10mo agoDenmark has an official system for sending digital mail, which is how we receive letters from the government, bank statements, pay slips, and so on. Without this base load of paper mail, the economics of delivering paper mail stopped working.
- crazybonkersai 10mo agoIt’s striking that while many states push citizens toward digital-only public services, almost none provide a state-run email service. Instead, official communication is effectively outsourced to foreign, commercial platforms with uneven privacy records (e.g. Gmail). If governments are serious about digital sovereignty and data protection, they should operate their own email infrastructure and issue each citizen an official address, much like a social security number. Whether people actually use it or prefer a private alternative should remain a personal choice—but the state shouldn’t depend on third-party platforms as its default communication layer.
- anal_reactor 10mo ago> state-run email service I think that companies providing certain basic services like email or messaging should eventually become branches of the government. This is the only way to provide these services with subsidies without enshittification.
- harrisoned 10mo agoThis is something that worries me. I know that the laws/constitution that guarantees the rights of somebody may vary from country to country (and may not even be enforced by the letter), but lets say: All commercial companies will have a ToS, data sharing agreements, etc. You, as a user, i assume is not obligated to agree to that ToS at the expense of not using the service. If a government body requires you to use their service to access basic services (and offers no 'offline' alternative) required by law, are they, by proxy, coercing you to accept a commercial ToS? I would very much like to hear a lawyer opinion on this. I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
- _djo_ 10mo agoThe Dutch government has one approach to the email service issue, by having a website and app, Berichtenbox, where you can receive official communications. They're regularly extending it to include municipalities as well. However it's one-way only at the moment, there's no way to use it for two-way communication.
- zeristor 10mo agoIt could be worse. They could rely on providing banking services via shoddy software, and prosecute people, and hound them to death rather than face up as to how crap their software is, until someone makes a TV mini series about it to highlight the issue.