Dusts off old copy of "The Crying of Lot 49"...perhaps there's an alternative. We Await Secret Trystero's Empire!
posted by gimonca at 7:37 AM on March 6 [6 favorites]

That's a shame but it makes sense of the context of Denmark, at least according to the first link. Evidently the country is very digital, so it just doesn't make sense to pay for the infrastructure to get letters around a country quickly. Packages are the future all over the world, so letters will become small packages. They'll be more expensive, sure, but they are rarer now.

Which could make them more special to receive. If you're sending a letter as a package, why not include a few sentimental or meaningful items?

One of the joys are participating in the Annual Mefi Valentine Card Exchange was getting various extra pieces of Valentine's stuff, highly recommended for next year!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:41 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Plenty of questions. How does this affect any relationship that Denmark has with the Universal Postal Union?

If I send a postcard to someone in Denmark after that date via the regular mail from another country, what happens to it? Landfill? Shredder?
posted by gimonca at 7:54 AM on March 6 [8 favorites]

Some might argue that this is akin to getting rid of telegrams. However, telegrams weren't a public good; they were privately owned. This shifts people from the opportunity to use a public good to being forced to use corporate products to convey their messages to other people.
posted by rednikki at 7:58 AM on March 6 [12 favorites]

It's true; When I moved to Denmark 5 + years ago, the disappearance of the Post Office was one of the first observations I made about this place.

Here is a photo I took of one of these beautiful red boxes - It's one of my favorite photographs from the city.

Last week I had to send a letter to my daughter in the USA. Because indeed there are no more "Post offices" like in the old days, I had to walk to the local mall [Fortunately, there are only 3 malls here in Copenhagen afaik, and one of them in a walking distance from where I live] and visit a department store whose customer service desk upfront serves also as a delivery center. The stamp cost 50 DKK (about US$7.25), which is a lot, but what can you do.

As far as the privatising of the USPO and selling it off for scraps, it's sad too, but imho it's the least urgent piece of the wholesale dismantling of the American Empire itself.
posted by growabrain at 8:12 AM on March 6 [4 favorites]

On the one hand, how will people get thier junk mail? On the other hand how will people get postcards? If you don't have a functioning post office, does that mean you no longer need an address? I mean if you don't get packages. I know that a lot of organizations *want* you to have an address, but the post office is the one that insists on a daily basis. This seems very cyberpunk to me, in a "don't create the torment nexus" kind of way.
posted by surlyben at 8:27 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Those posts you see on social media along the lines of 'Name something a child today would not know anthing about' - it struck me recently that 'writing a letter, putting a stamp on it and posting it' isn't that far off from being universal. My 21 and 18 year olds have never done it to my knowledge.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:49 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty old, but I get all my bills electronically, my kids send me photos and videos via text or Instagram, and my elderly parents call or email me.

The only physical mail I get is junk mail. Getting a handwritten letter is really nice and I still sometimes send them, but there are reasonable alternatives to a national mail service to accommodate this. I applaud Denmark's jump into the future.
posted by Phreesh at 8:52 AM on March 6

Have Danish institutions figured out how to deal with the issue that while postal mail can be considered delivered to a household, electronic communications (at least in the US) are almost always delivered to an individual? Like, if one's spouse dies and the utility bill shows up in the post in their name the following month, the surviving spouse still got that bill and can pay it and go through the billing change yadda yadda.

On the other hand, my wife gets all of our household bills electronically and I'm mildly concerned that I would have no idea which bills were due if she were to die unexpectedly. I mean, I get how expensive maintaining a mailing infrastructure is for everybody involved and I could be convinced that it's not worth it, but there are aspects of the alternative that aren't much better even 20 years after paperless billing became common.
posted by Kyol at 9:00 AM on March 6 [6 favorites]

How much of the electronic infrastructure replacing postal mail does Denmark own?
posted by clew at 9:16 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to remember...it seems like there have been a couple of times in the past where I've confirmed my residence (or existence) by receiving a piece of paper mail, and then responding by using an enclosed postage-paid card or envelope.

I would guess that that would be replaced by a more expensive Fedex- or DHL-based transaction, if it's needed at all.

Vast majority of identity confirmations that I've done recently have been phone-based MFA.
posted by gimonca at 9:40 AM on March 6

I would have no idea which bills were due if she were to die unexpectedly

The vast majority of that kind of bill is paid by direct debit in most of Europe.

When my father passed last autumn we just looked at his bank statements to identify the companies that needed notification. Where we could find electronic contact information I contacted them electronically.

My brother and I have POA over the bank account so when I notified the bank by email they were happy to just keep the account running until we ask them to close it.

My brother took over my father's apartment and he opened a new account with the electricity provider in his name and closed our father's. No paper was exchanged.

The only people who got paper were the court and a couple of very small businesses that we could not find any electronic contact information for.
posted by koahiatamadl at 9:43 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]

And so as not to abuse the edit window - my father refused to learn digital anything. that's why he had paper bank statements. But I am making sure I have access to my more digitally savvy, older relatives' electronic bank statements for example.
posted by koahiatamadl at 9:46 AM on March 6

Where I live postal service privatization has seen letter delivery become unreliable and expensive hand in hand with package delivery becoming unreliable and (more) expensive, which has led to the rise of (expensive) private courier companies, which is probably used to justify more postal service cutbacks and so on.

I've been reading the collected letters of some late 19th-century characters and it's remarkable to see multiple letters exchanged in a conversation and realize it's all from the same date, because they're in the same city, and also conversations across different cities and countries happening so quickly that it's hard to believe this was before air mail. These days sending anything by mail feels like a huge gamble to me, because I've had it fail - and I have no expectation of anyone receiving anything in less than a matter of weeks, not days.

Offtopic: growabrain, the part about Denmark (or just Copenhagen?) libraries in your list is amazing. "Your library card allows you to get in and out - day or night - and self-check your own books"!?
posted by trig at 10:01 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]

I find it between funny and sad that the Danish Post office honored the very thing that was eventually going to make it obsolete in a postage stamp from 1999.
posted by Omon Ra at 10:28 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I'm curious if they send Christmas cards in Denmark? We don't generally get much mail we actually want, except in the month of December, when we get at least a couple dozen cards in the mail from friends and family most years. I'm in my thirties so this isn't just a boomer thing, people didn't used to send holiday cards in our twenties but I think once folks have kids, mailing out a stack of photo cards to friends and relatives with a little "yearly update" note on the back is a thing many of us are still doing.

Wondering if people just don't do this in Denmark, or if there's been any conversation about the future of this tradition. I don't think people would keep mailing holiday cards if it cost much more than a dollar apiece.
posted by potrzebie at 10:33 AM on March 6

Kinda weird to delete the comment that references the US postal service as postal services are an interconnected network and that's what is possibly most important to any postal service (Denmark's included)?? I guess I can take it to metatalk but I don't really feel the need for a huge debate but...

I guess I will say that I think any country stopping their postal service has an international impact that is bad.
posted by latkes at 11:39 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Also, privatization of key services is bad. Including in Denmark.
posted by latkes at 11:40 AM on March 6 [5 favorites]

@potrzebie: I do send and receive Christmas cards with a Danish cousin. He's in his nineties but he does know his way around a computer. We wouldn't have known of his existence if it weren't for the internet; he reached out to my mother on an online genealogy site.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 11:43 AM on March 6

I live in neighbouring Sweden, which also uses Postnord (which is a multinational JV) for letter services. Physical mail is still a thing here, but increasingly less so. Almost all banking, billing, and interaction with public services or utilities is done digitally, which can take the form of a website or an app. I can see the same thing happening here. Even though I am a digital native, I still find it somewhat frightening to think that a lack of internet access (or more likely, access to MFA) could cut me off from communication with the world almost arbitrarily.
posted by hankmajor at 1:08 PM on March 6

Hope this leads to the death of Postnord here in Sweden too somehow. They were forced upon us when the Swedish state got rid of the postal service and they suck donkey balls. Their favorite money maker is to "help us" with import, so that anything from outside EU, including gifts, including repair returns, spare parts, low value items well below the threshold for import (120$ or so) are stopped in customs u til we pay the ransom. This might be a tax of 5 cents, for which they charge a handling fee of like another 8 bucks. No way to have an account the tax is pulled from, no way to tell them "this is incorrect", you can only pay and then appeal afterwards. Nearly lost a 300 quid shipment today because the payment request was held up getting to us and they nearly returned the package to the US. Fuck Postnord.
posted by Iteki at 1:14 PM on March 6 [3 favorites]

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