Denmark Postal Service To Stop Delivering Letters (bbc.com) 45
Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. From a report: The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as "there is a free market for both letters and parcels." Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany's Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a "socially responsible manner."
Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come. Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically. PostNord says it will switch its focus to parcel deliveries and that any postage stamps bought this year or in 2024 can be refunded for a limited period in 2026.
Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come. Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically. PostNord says it will switch its focus to parcel deliveries and that any postage stamps bought this year or in 2024 can be refunded for a limited period in 2026.
Postcards from the Beyond (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Postcards from the Beyond (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Postcards from the Beyond (Score:4, Informative)
While paying bills with a bank transfer is safe, you still need to know the amount to pay for services that are not fixed cost. Where I live, utilities offer mailed bill or auto-pay, they do not offer email bill delivery. It is just not something they do.
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Authorizing auto pay is unacceptable risk to me, as there is no cap on what they can charge.
I agree. However, at least in the US, you can do online bill-pay while not authorizing automatic payments. I get a notice from my bank when a new bill comes in; then I go to their site, review the bill, and then manually enter a payment.
I also manually set up the payment info for repeat billers who still send out snail-mail bills (such as my county with its bi-yearly property taxes, or my old doctor's office). You could do the same for one-off bills as well, although in that case you'd have to decide whethe
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Bills are paid via ACH bank transfers or CC charge. You log into an account and set up auto pay.
Or initiate the ACH payments manually from your bank account online. I do this for most of my bills with only a very few auto-paid via a CC and none auto-debited from my bank account.
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If your rural company can't do online payments, I'd argue that it isn't the city that is 'shitty' in this case.
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In Europe there are pretty severe consequences for draining your bank account, and the automatic payment systems have various safety features that prevent those kinds of mistakes anyway. It's extremely rare, and if it does happen they have to make it right - not just pay you back, but pay all the associated costs arising from not having the money available. In the past even bank system failures have resulted in substantial costs due to things like house purchases failing to go through and people being tempo
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So if its "self funded" than going private should be OK right? Right, it will die off within a few years of privitization buddy. It wont survive based on fees vs cost to delivery services. Its a burden on the tax payer.
By definition, if it's self-funded it's not a "burden" on the tax payer.
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So if its "self funded" than going private should be OK right? Right, it will die off within a few years of privitization buddy. It wont survive based on fees vs cost to delivery services. Its a burden on the tax payer.
It's not a burden on the taxpayer, because it's self funded. It already survives based on fees vs delivery cost, even while feeding a mandated vast surplus in their retirement fund.
The USPS *is* a burden on all the people who don't live out in the boondocks, because with nationwide flat rates, their postage subsidizes deliveries of MAGA hats to the sticks.
What privatization would actually do is cause the postal service to reallocate costs in a quest for "profitability". Basically, boondock service would be
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So if its "self funded" than going private should be OK right? Right, it will die off within a few years of privatization buddy. It wont survive based on fees vs cost to delivery services. Its a burden on the tax payer.
Privatization would probably make things worse as it would add a profit motive. The USPS isn't suppose to be profitable, it's suppose to be universal and reliable. A lot of their financial insufficiency stems from the (stupid) Congressional requirement, passed in 2006, to pre-fund their pension 75 years into the future. This was finally rescinded in 2022, but I'm not sure they've recovered yet.
The USPS Fairness Act [apwu.org]
Congress passes $50 bln U.S. Postal Service relief bill [reuters.com]
One reason for the large losses is 2006 legislation mandating USPS pre-fund more than $120 billion in retiree healthcare and pension liabilities.
The new bill eliminates requirements USPS pre-fund retiree health benefits for current and retired employees for 75 years, a requirement no business or other federal entity faces. USPS projects it would sharply reduce its pre-funding liability and save it roughly $27 billion over 10 years.
It requires future retirees to enroll in Medicare. About 25% of postal retirees do not enroll in Medicare even though they are eligible, which results in USPS paying higher premiums than other employers. USPS estimates the change could save it about $22.6 billion over 10 years.
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There is a huge legal problem with turning the USPS private. It is actually mandated by the constitution.
I know Trump likes to wipe his bum with the document, but I prefer following the established method of chage - constitutional amendment.
What can be done is things like shifting more towards package delivery, maybe not having 6 day delivery in all places, etc...
Even the EV thing. Cost saving in the long run even though more expensive initially. The post office going with a military contractor and a cus
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Also not quite sure if Postal Service is called out in Denmark's founding document the way it is in the US [wikipedia.org]
It's not just the last mile services USPS provides but even in todays age a lot of legal procedure is built around paper mail because of that fact that it is a guaranteed service (if you want to show someone got something in court the baseline standard is still USPS Certified/Return Receipt), changing that status upends a lot of things.
And this is a case of where the USA geographic size does really make
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Yup and thusly why most people who want it to disappear or privatize either are ignorant of the history, why the Founders put it in the Constitution (it's not like they listed a ton of similar things with mandates) and what greater function it serves.
People who put it to simply "it loses money" is a real missing the forest for the trees and again, not aware of the history of it going semi-private [wikipedia.org] when it historically was a Cabinet Office or the pension mandate which is a primarily reason for all those bad g
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Article I, Section 8, Clause 7?
It appears from a little research that this was written before the 2nd Amendment.
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And yet the Founding Fathers as well all talk about how smart they were and how we should respect them decided to create the Federal Post Office in 1775 (!) before America had even won the Revolutionary War and once they did the first "real" Post Office was created back in 1792. If those same folks and document who lean on so much for the 2nd also have this history with the Post Office why is the former so valid and we can discard the latter? Especially when there is far more and older case law around the
Parcels (Score:3)
Unless you were born 100 years ago, there is this thing called e-mail.
Which is great for sending information but less so for sending parcels. As you note you could stop letter service but if you have to maintain a parcel service because commercial companies do not serve everywhere then are you really saving that much?
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It's a significant saving because you no longer need post boxes and associated collections, a giant letter sorting apparatus, and the volume of deliveries is reduced, leaving only the more profitable ones.
In the UK they also photograph every letter for "security" reasons, so there is a massive amount of data that can be discarded as well.
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Interesting FP, so I'll contribute to your Subject even though it seem unproductive to me. Like cancelling snail mail completely?
My "solution approach" would be an alias system so that people could use email addresses for snail mail. If you want to send something, you could just write the email address on it. I think it should be opt-in, so the recipients would have to decide whether or not to register the snail mail address for a particular email address. Also, the default should be only first-class or hig
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No letters (Score:2)
I can understand that there are no personal letters any more, but what about commercial mail?
How do businesses in DN send out bills? How do their clients pay bills? Not everybody is on the internet, especially old people.
I can understand that the Danish government will be needing to spend a lot more money on its military, with the end of the NATO alliance.
Bullshit excuse (Score:2)
I think that the real thing that is happening here is that the Danish part of PostNord has been mismanaged for years and this move from them is just a way to cut losses.
Unfortunately for me in Sweden, PostNord had merged with what was formerly the Swedish Postal Service, and the Swedish post is also suffering because of it.
They have not announced an end to mail delivery over here, but mail does not get delivered as often as before, and mail often gets lost. I've got overdue bills and lost doctor's appointme
Canada Post (Score:2)
I suspect if they are not careful and they carry this on much longer everyone is going to notice that they really don't need
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At the same time, a company called Dao has said that they are interested in taking over the delivery of mail in Denmark, so it might continue. But for a higher price I assume, since this is about PostNord's deficit.
Hey Greenland! (Score:3)
Just sayin'.
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If you want mail service, it's guaranteed under the US Constitution.
So is Birthright Citizenship, for that matter (14th amendment) - and the same clown who wants to end that is the one who wants to take over Greenland.
Birthright citizenship not so simple (Score:2)
As this lawyer says in the LA Times, Trump's position may be legally sound!
https://www.latimes.com/opinio... [latimes.com]
Yes, I was surprised too.