Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, has announced it will stop delivering letters by the end of this year, citing a massive decline in letter volumes. The decision brings an end to a 400-year tradition, with 1,500 post boxes set to be removed starting in June.
Musk, who unofficially leads the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration, has called for privatizing USPS and Amtrak.
https://www.benzinga.com/news/25/03/44275286/denmark-is-removing-all-post-boxes-and-stopping-letter-deliveries-is-the-us-heading-in-the-same-direction-under-musks-vision
12 Comments
Denmark did it because almost no one is sending and/or receiving letters in Denmark anymore. I don’t know if that’s the case in the US too.
I feel that Denmark is a much more futuristic country. I don’t see physical mail declining in the US. In the last few years I think the amount of mail I receive has gone up.
If Denmark only has 1500 mailboxes in the entire country which are barely used that makes sense. But the US has probably millions of mailboxes. This probably won’t happen in our lifetime
It’d be a little hilarious if the anti-EU American Right started modeling after countries that are in the EU.
Interesting propaganda attempt—make us think the postal service is useless. Newsflash: Denmark is geographically tiny, their federal mail system isnt as important to them as ours is to us. They may not, for example, need to drive 3 hours to the nearest polling station to vote. They may also have nice things like a functioning democracy that doesn’t try to prevent people from voting in person. Nice try, though.
This is unlikely to happen due the sheer volume of junk mail in the US. Those fuckers have a lobby.
“Basically, something’s got to have some chance of going bankrupt, or there’s not a good feedback loop for improvement,” Musk said at a recent Morgan Stanley MS conference. “We should try to privatize everything we possibly can, and that would be my recommendation.”
Trump, who has long been critical of USPS, has suggested moving it under the Department of Commerce and possibly replacing its board of governors. “Privatizing the Postal Service is not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” he said in December, citing the rise of private carriers like FedEx FDX and UPS UPS. His administration has also considered executive orders that could lead to deeper restructuring of the agency.
In the past year ive only gotten a few pieces of mail that weren’t junk delivered by “usps” (ignoring Amazon packages delivered by usps)
Email has killed most reasons for the USPS, and UPS, fedex, and Amazon has killed the rest.
Edit: If they want to do something useful that’s fulfilling their original charter, maybe they could make a secure, trustable, non-spammable email system. It’s something that isn’t really in anybody else’s incentives to make and/or manage.
You cannot, there is just certain things that will always be postal service. It is what it is.
<Musk has called for privatizing USPS and Amtrak.>
Yes, why should all that money go to the government?
/s
Denmark is also smaller than the state of West Virginia, that might have an impact on their decision.
UK. I mean I can’t recall sending a letter last time email is so much more convenient…. Now parcels on the other hand… But royal mail doesn’t come first for parcels for me due to worse tracking than competitors… Postmans are nicest but if competition can give me 1h window, 15min notification AND sometimes even how many stops postman has before getting to me, but best royal mail can do is out for delivery with 4h window as a most expensive option, otherwise simply “delivered” or “out for delivery”…. Sorry!