Have you sent your significant other a love letter recently, or posted a postcard to a long-distance friend? No, neither have we. The truth is that classic physical mail has been on the decline for decades, but not just because of a lack of letter-writing.
While plenty of people still receive bank statements, bills, and local news on paper around the world, you can opt to do all that online, and Denmark, one of the planet’s most digitalised countries, is officially calling time on its state-run postal service.
PostNord has seen a 90 percent decline in letter volumes since the year 2000, and a 30 percent decrease in the last year alone – overall, that’s a drop from 1.4 billion to just 110 million annually.
So, after 400 years of service, it will no longer be delivering letters, and we can expect the country’s 1,500 post boxes to gradually disappear from this month onward. The operator will still be available for parcel deliveries, and if you’ve already bought your stamps, those can be refunded.
But, is there anything else to blame for this shift in habit? According to the BBC, the Postal Act 2024 opened up the letter-sending market to private operators, meaning the cost of postage leapt up. PostNord Denmark’s managing director Kim Pedersen told local media that ‘when a letter costs 29 Danish krone (€3.90), there will be fewer letters.’
Fewer, but not none. While 95 percent of Danes use Digital Post, around 271,000 people still rely on physical mail. It’s thought that elderly people, and those who live in remote areas will be impacted the most by the change.
But PostNord (which also operates in Sweden) isn’t the only European operator facing tough times. Germany’s Deutsche Post announced earlier this year that it planned on axing 8,000 jobs.
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