Please, Mr. Postman! Denmark bids farewell to letter delivery and mailboxes

COPENHAGEN — Epistolophobes rejoice! On Dec. 30, Denmark’s national postal authority PostNord will stop delivering paper letters, concluding a service first offered in 1624.

The decision to sunset the delivery of physical missives is a pragmatic one: PostNord reported an operating deficit of 428 million krone — or €57 million — last year. Given the volume of physical missives processed has decreased by over 90 percent since 2000, ending the service is a clear cost-cutting decision.

“PostNord Denmark has a long history in which letters have been an important part, but with Denmark being one of the most digitalized countries in the world, most of the Danes no longer send physical letters,” said Andreas Brethvad, the company’s director of public affairs and communications. The postal authority will now pivot to focus on the delivery of e-commerce parcels instead — a service used by eight out of every 10 Danes who routinely shop online.

However, Danish law guarantees citizens have the right to send and receive physical letters. So, with PostNord no longer offering the service, shipping and distribution company Dao will be stepping in. From January on, Danes wishing to send letters at home or abroad will have to hand them in at the private company’s shops — which already processed 30 million missives this year — and affix them with its corporate stamps.

Dao said it’s “excited” to provide the service, for which the company is set to receive 110 million krone (€14.7 million) in government subsidies. And in a post on its corporate website, the parcel processing group highlights new data that suggests physical correspondence is experiencing a revival among younger Danes who are embracing pen-and-paper communication.

The company now aims to capitalize on this trend by lowering letter delivery fees and ramping up its processing capacity to up to 80 million letters next year.

“Many believe that letters are disappearing, but they still play an important role,” said Dao Sales Director Lars Balsby, who stressed they seek to provide the service for the foreseeable future. “We will be here tomorrow, in five years, and in 10 years.”

End of an era

PostNord’s decision to stop its physical mail delivery service means the phaseout of 1,500 jobs. It also spells the end for Denmark’s 1,500 red postboxes.

Brethvad said PostNord is sensitive to the fact that the postboxes are an iconic part of Danish heritage. Earlier this month, 1,000 of them were sold off in a special sale, and an additional 200 will be auctioned off in January, with all proceeds going to charities supporting children affected by crisis situations around the world.

The remaining boxes will be preserved to “serve new, meaningful purposes,” Brethvad explained. And while that future use is yet to be determined, the successful conversion of unused telephone boxes into pop-up libraries in places like the U.K. and Sweden demonstrates that defunct on-street infrastructure can, indeed, have a successful second act.

Denmark isn’t the only EU country revising the way it handles mail, though.

Across Europe, postal authorities are trying to cut costs by outsourcing or eliminating services and slashing jobs. After six decades, Deutsche Post scrapped its next-day air mail delivery service in Germany last year and is currently laying off thousands of workers. Poland’s Poczta Polska is similarly slashing thousands of jobs in a bid to reduce losses.

With postal services hard-pressed to cut costs, mailboxes and letter-bearing postal workers could eventually go the way of the pigeon post Paris relied on during the Franco-Prussian War, or the pneumatic mail service that whooshed messages across Prague until 2002.