Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters
58 comments
·March 6, 2025Svip
jorvi
In The Netherlands the traditional postal had switched to every-other-day delivery for non-critical mail, and 09:00 postbox pickup instead of 17:00.
It might feel a bit awkward for people who are used to everyday delivery, but with the low volume of mail something has to give. Either € per letter rises, or letter per € drops.
mrweasel
PostNord already did this in Denmark, to the extreme, which render their services pretty useless. Letters will frequently take up to 10 days to arrive.
A previously employer resorted to ask staff to take mail with them as they traveled between locations and drop of letters to clients when they either visited or drove past anyway.
Some government services didn't take the hint and mailed papers for signing, asking for them to be mailed back within 14 days, but if the letters doesn't arrive until 10 days later, how are you suppose to have it returned within 14?
Danes don't send much mail anyway, but the reduction of service just made everything worse. You can barely rely on PostNord for Christmas cards without posting them before December.
Their package delivery service is excellent though, but only in certain parts of the country.
Cthulhu_
I'd rather they subsidized it and bring back fulltime employment. It went from a uniformed government job to a part-time bring-your-own-bike "gig" job.
But I believe that if you hire full-time staff that can work with a bit more flexibility - wider area for delivery, picking up mail as well, that kinda thing - instead of min/maxing it they can keep up if not improve the quality of work.
riggsdk
According to TV2 Denmark, DAO (who distributed news papers and parcels) has made a bid to take over: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/business/2025-03-06-slut-med-postnord...
afandian
The general decline in paper copies of official documents is scary.
The recent Conservative UK government put in place the "hostile environment" policy (official name!) and expelled and denied rights to people who had lived here for years, and had the right to. People were asked for documents going back years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?
smallerfish
> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?
"electronic" isn't necessary for this question. Most people do not keep paper copies of their payslips going back 10 or 20 years either.
amiga386
If my employer emailed me my payslip, I'd have a perfect record, as I have every email sent/recieved since the 1990s, with archives and backups too. I could passively collect them, like I passively received paper payslips and stored them, unopened, in a folder on a shelf.
But they don't. At best, they send me an email notifying me that if only I went to a website they run (when it's operational) and passed all sorts of second factor bullshit, and knew where to navigate to, I could download a copy. Apparently it's not secure if they just email it to me, but it was secure enough to send the same data through the hands of hundreds of postal workers.
People only have so much bandwidth, and requiring them to actively do a bunch of menial tasks that could be automated, but aren't, in the name of "security" is building up problems for the future.
afandian
You forgot the part where the platform rebranded and got a new domain name. And you have to log in with your company email address. And even if you switched it to your personal email before you left, and they kept the data, was the password rotated?
afandian
If payslips are paper, people at least have a fighting chance of retaining them. I have payslips from when I was a teenager. Not because I kept them, because I never threw them away.
Electronic documents, however, need deliberate attention to keep.
smallerfish
I purge paper after a year or two at most, and keep very limited important stuff digitally (I have my tax returns going back 5-10 years.)
I really don't think many people keep substantial amounts of paper records. The government policy cited upthread was clearly a scandal; most UK citizens would be unable to satisfy the same standard of proof, if that was in fact the test.
tokioyoyo
I have more electronic documents saved up from 15 years ago than paper ones. It works both ways though.
the__alchemist
They're next to my receipt filing-cabinet.
xattt
Some form of Paperless-NGX setup is also an option :)
Cthulhu_
I've kept pay slips in a binder for years and while it was cute to review how much I earned 15 years ago, there was no other reason. I as a civilian do not have any archival requirements once a year's tax records have been finished. The party handling my pay slips - be it an employer or a 3rd party - presumably has a statutory requirement to archive these things for X years.
megadata
The missing documents case is mentioned in this brilliant podcast, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford | Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc: https://www.podbean.com/ea/dir-s4nk7-1bcc6872
He mentions a lot of other problems with missing digital docs.
Like high court rulings are referencing URLs that don't exist anymore.
kelnos
I don't have copies of any payslips. And this isn't because they're digital. If they'd been mailed to me I would have recycled them all by now.
Someone
> your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?
Many (I would hope all, but the world is a weird place) countries have laws stating for how long ago you need to be able to provide various kinds of data to the government.
I would think you wouldn’t need to do that for payslips of 10 or 20 years ago, as companies typically aren’t allowed to keep that data around for that long.
Mashimo
> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?
I don't know how far it goes back, but in Denmark it should be in the electronic inbox. e-boks / mit.dk
Ufvasl
Yeah, most digital services keep these things for you, unless you actively delete it,which few people do. Whereas most people will throw out that stupid old paper.
ghssds
To operate a postal service, we need, as a strict minimum:
- A workforce with a pulse.
To operate a digital network, we need, as a strict minimum:
- A constant supply of electricity;
- Lot of complex tools built far away from lot of exotic material from all around the world;
- A workforce with lot of education and specialization.
We're making our civilization brittle and call that progress.
amiga386
I'm very much in favour of the postal service, but I don't think you're being fair in this comparison.
To operate a postal service, you need a lot of sorting offices and service points (postboxes, post offices, letterboxes). Unless you have this infrastructure, I'm envisioning a postal service with a maximum capacity of whatever all its employees can hold in their hands at one time.
And you need an addressing system and/or lots of people familiar with the local area, otherwise delivery is too unreliable for use.
And you need an internal police force to stop your own workforce stealing people's goods -- the employees "with a pulse" but not "a lot of education" are especially bad for doing that.
Meanwhile, in remote African villages, you buy things at the shop by sending a text message like "pay 32.10 to 67319" on your Nokia 3210 from 1999. It texts the vendor confirmation, it texts you back a receipt. The phones are battery powered, you charge them with a solar panel or a hand crank. The radio masts (and backend servers) that power this service are sometimes lacking electricity, but you just learn to go shopping when there's signal.
Certainly, it wouldn't be easy to get back to having Nokia 3210s if some kind of global destruction happened. But the same is true of pen and paper -- we need industrial levels of production for paper, ink, pens (or quills), and good storage, for paper-based record keeping. Before that, we used cuneiform on clay tablets... I think we can assume that we'll keep our ability to manufacture basic ICs and remember how to do radio communication, we won't ever have to revert back to pre-Marconi days.
GranularRecipe
That's the trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Another example are the egg prices in US. The industrialisation of agriculture made it more brittle.
7952
And that simple approach can be ridiculously scalable. Look at how mailing/parcels/printing could scale up during covid. Mail can put a document in the hands of tens of millions quickly.
Mashimo
What happened during covid with the postal system?
More people ordering online?
Freak_NL
Did you completely miss that part? Ordering stuff from the internet went through the roof and the effect on physical shops is being felt even now with bankruptcies often being traced back to the bad years of the lockdowns.
loloquwowndueo
There’s even a movie: the Postman :) (everybody hated that movie)
ReptileMan
There is even better one - Postal
Probably the only really good Uwe Boll movie.
emptysongglass
Having lived around the world and now residing in Denmark for a decade plus, I can confidently say PostNord is the worst postal service I've ever seen in my entire life.
If you Google r/copenhagen PostNord you will see countless horror stories, mostly focused around delivery drivers simply refusing to do their job by purposely not delivering packages. I doubt freeing them of their obligation to deliver letters is going to improve things.
We also have the full might of the state behind them who will happily charge you multiples of the value of your item coming in from out of country because they "inspected" it.
People in the US don't understand how good they've had it (well until very recently with tariffs), as you could get any item you wanted delivered to your doorstep with no additional fees and better customer service at a fraction of the price it costs us.
Mashimo
I have quite the opposite experience. PostNord called me once because I was not home, and I could tell them to just leave the package at the door. Now you can just do it via the app.
While I quite often from friend in America see that packages get re-routed multiple times to states around them.
null
xigurat
If you do that here in Germany the whole country collapsed under a week.
fnordian_slip
Well, back to /r/fountainpenpals in order to send more letters, so that this doesn't happen in my country. I love letters and postcards, but I've become lazy recently.
While I'm not luddite, there is something special in sending and receiving a handwritten letters, even if the handwriting is as poor as mine. And it gives you an excuse to spend time with high quality writing implements and the opportunity to share something unique. The texture of proper paper is just so radically different from standard printer paper [0].
Btw. if anyone else is similarly inclined to get back into writing letters, I can recommend letterlocking [1]. Even though it's a bit of a gamble if the seal makes it through the post unharmed (I sometimes cheat and send the letter inside an extra envelope), the recipients are usually delighted, and that's what counts.
[0]: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/forum/36-paper-and-... [1]: https://youtu.be/KMsuFaMoT28
CharlieDigital
One underrated thing I appreciate about the USPS: postal fraud is serious business so I know that if it's important, it will always show up in my mailbox.
Easy to avoid email and SMS scams.
alwayslikethis
Wire fraud is no less serious punishment wise. The main factor is probably the operation cost, as sending scam mails is more expensive per recipient and scams usually have a fairly low yield.
CharlieDigital
> Wire fraud is no less serious punishment wise
That's why all of your official tax and government documents continue to be delivered via email and I appreciate that.
beardyw
In the UK we regularly get small packages delivered by the postman which would otherwise need a trip by a delivery company.
Mashimo
If I understood it correctly, PostNord will still deliver packages in Denmark.
woleium
are you sure that they are not just doing the last mile? Many packages are delivered to the local sorting office y alternative courier
369548684892826
Either way, delivery driver trips have been reduced
bell-cot
Ungood. Whatever you think about the economics of letter delivery, or the advantages of all-digital - a good, old-fashioned postal service is an important part of a nation's social and trust networks.
hoppp
Denmark is very advanced in digital service adoption. They are an almost cashless society.
The mail infrastructure should be cherished I agree but if there is no demand, there is no reason to operate other than a novelty
mrweasel
> postal service is an important part of a nation's social and trust networks
We're not using it for anything, so I'm not really sure how it contributes. Plus PostNord (the Danish postal service) doesn't have the best of reputations, though that is dependent on where in the country you're located.
janmarsal
Just put the letter in a box and send the box.
zoobab
What about old people who can't master computers?
Mashimo
They have to use another carrier.
I'm actually not sure if you still can get government communication in paper form, in Denmark.
Edit: Ah, yes you can get an exemption from digital post: https://www.borger.dk/hjaelp-og-vejledning/hvad-har-du-brug-...
zoobab
Other countries like Switzerland are thinking at passing laws to protect people from this mandatory use of computers (e-government). Let me find the reference.
Denmark is a member of the Universal Postal Union, which requires each member to deliver letters received from abroad. It's unclear who will now have that responsibility. When the new postal act went into effect last year, it opened up the market for domestic letter deliveries, but PostNord was still responsible for foreign (both in- and outbound) deliveries.
Edit: Found a note on their website:
> You can send letters to and from abroad with PostNord for the rest of the year. PostNord Denmark has been appointed by the Ministry of Transport to handle international mail until 31 December 2025. After that, it will be up to the Ministry of Transport to decide, e.g. through a tender, who will handle the task in the future.