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.
The Danish postal service has been responsible for delivering letters in the country since 1624. In the last 25 years, letter-sending has been in sharp decline in Denmark, with a fall of more than 90%.
But evidence suggests a resurgence in letter-writing among younger people could be under way.
Dao said its research had found 18- to 34-year-olds send two to three times as many letters as other age groups, citing the trend researcher Mads Arlien-Søborg, who puts the rise down to young people “looking for a counterbalance to digital oversaturation”. Letter-writing, he said, had become a “conscious choice”.
According to Danish law, the option to send a letter must exist. This means that if Dao were to stop delivering letters, the government would be obliged to appoint somebody else to do it.
And then, right at the end:
Announcing their decision earlier this year, Kim Pedersen, the deputy chief executive of PostNord Denmark, said: “We have been the Danish postal service for 400 years, and therefore it is a difficult decision to tie the knot on that part of our history. The Danes have become more and more digital and this means there are very few letters left today, and the decline continues so significantly that the letter market is no longer profitable.”
The point of a postal system isn’t to generate profit (although they totally can), it’s to ensure the populace can send things securely without having to do it themselves. But… if the Danish postal system (or at least the bit that delivers letters) isn’t profitable… why would a private company voluntarily take it over? They’ll have to make it profitable, which means gutting either the services offered and raising prices, or gutting the company itself and selling off assets. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to do the latter, so maybe some kind of government subsidy to ensure a profit? But then, why privatise at all?
It’s hard to see this as anything but concerning, for the Danish people.
At some point, the relevance of the system becomes so low, and the cost so high, that it doesn’t make sense to maintain. Imagine still maintaining horse feeding stations along the roads.
I agree, the point of post isn’t to be profitable. But when it’s no longer critical infrastructure, and the state can’t maintain it without extensive losses, then we should privatise it. If the private sector can’t maintain it with a profit, and it remains non-critical, we should shut it down.
Not sure I buy the “not critical infrastructure” argument. Even if 95% of public (and private) correspondence is digital these days, paper-mail is still used as a fallback for some institutions and whenever a physical copy must be sent for whatever reason.
That is an easy question to answer. Sending letters becomes non-critical when it is cheaper to send the incidental letter as a package than it is to maintain the letter sending service.
Keep in mind that Denmark is a very digitalized society. Nearly everything is digital secure mail, like bills and information from the municipality or government. I’d say it’s closer to 99.5% than 95%.
And then, right at the end:
The point of a postal system isn’t to generate profit (although they totally can), it’s to ensure the populace can send things securely without having to do it themselves. But… if the Danish postal system (or at least the bit that delivers letters) isn’t profitable… why would a private company voluntarily take it over? They’ll have to make it profitable, which means gutting either the services offered and raising prices, or gutting the company itself and selling off assets. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to do the latter, so maybe some kind of government subsidy to ensure a profit? But then, why privatise at all?
It’s hard to see this as anything but concerning, for the Danish people.
At some point, the relevance of the system becomes so low, and the cost so high, that it doesn’t make sense to maintain. Imagine still maintaining horse feeding stations along the roads.
I agree, the point of post isn’t to be profitable. But when it’s no longer critical infrastructure, and the state can’t maintain it without extensive losses, then we should privatise it. If the private sector can’t maintain it with a profit, and it remains non-critical, we should shut it down.
Not sure I buy the “not critical infrastructure” argument. Even if 95% of public (and private) correspondence is digital these days, paper-mail is still used as a fallback for some institutions and whenever a physical copy must be sent for whatever reason.
I don’t think 95% is right, but in any case, when does it then stop being critical infrastructure? At 99% digital correspondence? 100%? Never?
Must we maintain a working national postal service, with all its employees and logistics, just in case?
That is an easy question to answer. Sending letters becomes non-critical when it is cheaper to send the incidental letter as a package than it is to maintain the letter sending service.
Keep in mind that Denmark is a very digitalized society. Nearly everything is digital secure mail, like bills and information from the municipality or government. I’d say it’s closer to 99.5% than 95%.