Getting a letter then will be all that much more special and or romantic. Unless it's jury duty.
Truly a bizarre and ridiculous action. Publicly owned and operated postal delivery is still very useful, especially as late stage capitalism continues getting more and more dystopic.
I don't even know what I would send in the mail. It's pretty much just a coupon/junk delivery service at this point. Just get rid of it.
Can't speak for everywhere or everyone, but my grandmother sure enjoys knowing when her hospital appointments are.
Yep. My aunt (in Sweden) still receives and pays all her bills by mail. She's never been online, she doesn't have an email account and she's never owned a computer or a cell phone.
Europe loves to clown on the US for a lack of social services, but the postal service is where it's reversed. In almost all of Europe, postal services are provided by private companies, with no public option. I guess the US was created at just the right time to recognize the benefit of a government postal service (thanks, Ben Franklin).
As someone that's lived in the US and Sweden, in my experience the US Postal Service is the only US government agency that's better than its Swedish counterpart.
USPS runs tens of thousands of post offices staffed by its own workers, while PostNord has privatized its retail services and makes you mail stuff from gas stations and tobacco shops. USPS delivers mail AND packages to your home six days a week, while PostNord only delivers mail 2-3 days a week and makes you pick up your packages from their partner businesses. USPS offers "Informed Delivery" as a free service that emails you every morning with scanned images of the mail you'll be receiving later in the day. You can renew your passport through USPS and they also offer some financial services.
Not France, not the Netherlands. Show me the stats on that claim?
In fact, are you American? 🙄
I am American, and not the previous commenter, but a quick Google and Wikipedia search seems to indicate that Germany, Denmark, The UK, Malta, ~~Sweden, Norway,~~ and Finland have all privatized their mail services. The reddit posts from years ago about it seem to indicate that most of the people who remember the state owned service preferred the state owned post to private post services.
So not all of Europe, but a decent amount of Western Europe seems to have privatized their post. I didn't see anything about Spain, Portugal, Greece or Italy, but as I said it was a quick glance around.
According to Wikipedia the shared Swedish/Danish postal service is shared 60%/40% by the Swedish and Danish governments respectively, so im not sure how privatised it is really if it's completely owned by government.
"The owners of PostNord Group are the state of Sweden (60 percent) and the Ministry of Transport of Denmark (40 percent)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord
PostNord (in Sweden at least) is partially privatized. It's government owned and operates its own logistics network, but the customer facing side of it is privatized. Instead of dedicated post offices staffed by PostNord employees, you mail and pick up packages at partner businesses staffed by retail workers. In my experience these are usually gas stations, grocery stores and tobacco shops.
Fair enough, I was extrapolating from a comment from a Finn who indicated that they privatized their post and handed it over to PostNord
Useful for what? Wasting resources? Filling space in mail boxes that nobody checks because there's never anything of interest in them?
Unless you mean having a postal service AT ALL, in which case you're right but also misunderstood what they're doing: they're not ending ALL portal services, they're just not wasting their resources on archaic snail mail letters anymore.
I highly doubt snail mail letters were a significant percentage of their deliveries.
Letter mail still has a purpose. Email really can’t replace it. Sending bills to proprietary portals I need to sign into to see what I owe is ridiculous. Just one more app bro.
Flip phones with voice and text only - no data - plans put a wrench in the whole internet portal thing.
Unless of course it's law to own a mobile device.
I usually get my bills in a PDF? You have to join sites to view them? I would hate that.
Email is both insecure and unreliable by design. I would never want to receive anything financially or legally important that way. As a notification option, sure, but not the only way.
I don't know if it's them getting worse or just I'm reading more news about them but the Danes kind of seem to suck.
What else have you seen about them?
Isn't snail mail the last legally protected communication?
The US needs to ban mail immediately.
Thankfully that would require an amendment to The Constitution, so it will never happen.
No, the Republicans will just keep crippling it until it's near useless.
You say that as if the Constitution even matters anymore.
They still mail packages, right? Why end delivering letters? They're just small packages.
In the year 2000, PostNord delivered nearly 1.5 billion letters. Last year, it delivered 110 million.
Makes sense when you really think about it. U.S. letter mail is mostly junk.
Canada post office has a standard letter being no more than 50g.
So 5.5 mil kg. That is a lot to carry.
I would hate it bc it makes the apps that companies make more enticing; which makes data collecting more profittable. So yeah.
This will last as long as reliable electricity and internet access does.
Thing is, it's going to create a historical hole in future archeological studies of this era, as the messages within digital devices are ephemral. Texts of today, unlike handwritten letters stand a slim chance of being a tangible artifact in 200 years.
Que sera..
This will last as long as reliable electricity and internet access does.
As will modern society.
Like stage coaches and telegraphs before them, snail mail letters are obsolete relics of a less convenient past.
Conveience is overrated and it fosters short-sightedness.
Don't be caugt up in the whizz-bang of energy dependency. In a power generation crisis situation the trivial stuff will be lost.
Texting links to TikTok of some cat jumping into a bird feeder isn't gonna survive. Sending your grandparents a snail-mail letter describing what you're doing just might.
When you have less life left in front of you, making a mark or leaving a mark on the world behind you takes on a different hue. EVERYONE - even you, will get to that point.
It's basic human nature.
I occasionally send a snail mail, and it's much more heartwarming to receive a handwritten letter than an email, so I don't think it is obsolete :(
Are they? They're sure great for those who can't use electronic forms of communication.
The generation that cant email, text or videocall are dying out. The fact is that everyone laments this, wrings their hands, calls it an outrage and then doesnt send a letter or christmas card ever and already gets all of their bills via email. They love the idea of mail.
It's a really good infrastructure to have as a fallback.
Oh this is not going to end well
Sucks to be a DNM user in Denmark
In the US you can’t even unsubscribe from the usps according to my letter carrier and their website. I’ve tried just never getting the mail but they end up bundling it up and sticking it in front of your front door.
Here's what you do. Dig the sidewalk down 50 feet. Just a sudden drop. 200 foot tall fence made of barbed wire and spiked metal. This reaches all the way to the 50 foot drop of the sidewalk.
The sidewalk is public property. So if he throws it down there, it's littering.
The fence is also electrified. Your mailbox is on the front porch. Thete's also random landmines in the yard, and swinging chainsaws being whirled around by pulleys.
Lets see him deliver those weekly savers ads now!
Clearly you aren't familiar with the mail carrier's oath.
When society collapses, the human population is at a historic low, and evil warlords stake claim to swathes of wasteland, The Postman can still be seen riding off into the horizon, for nothing will keep them from their assigned route.
Wait, the US doesn't have a free service to (a) remove you from postal spam lists and (b) stop spam being delivered?
In the UK, I registered my address on a few of the things listed here ( https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/post-and-parcels/stop-getting-junk-mail/ ). And the only junk mail I now receive are political flyers & takeout menus delivered outside of the postal service (ie by people, not posties).
Do Americans really have to put up with receiving random bullshit with no easy way of stopping it?!
Well, no.. but why refuse junk mail?
That's a resource being sent to you.
It's ok to work out how to use it. Those junk flyers make great barbecue starters, birdcage or catbox liners, packing for when you ship an item, the unprinted backsides of the letters are good to use for shopping lists and small to do notes..
Local grade schools can sometime use the junk mail newsprint for kids arts classes when they have paper mache projects (I've called to ask if they have needs of anything and ended up dropping off reams of that to my nearby school's art teacher..)
The rest of it goes straight away into a dedicated paper recycling bin.
(I even take those ubiquitous plastic shopping bags to the Walmart drop off bins for them.)
I don't refuse junk mail. I indicate my preference to not have it printed on paper, sent some distance, and hand delivered. I refuse it at the origin, not the destination.
Worst case, the postal service recycles it at origin instead of having to ship it.
Junk mail is junk.
It isn't a resource.
I don't think I've ever received something that meaningfully contributes towards a purchase that I actually want to make.
I buy what I need. I find what I want, I think about if I actually need it, I find local manufacturers, I find local suppliers.
I see if the price difference between local & inter/national is worth the saving (most of the time, it isn't and I'd rather buy from a local manufacturer or supplier, even at twice the price).
Then I decide if I should buy something.
Some paper shipped across the country and shoved through my letterbox is not going to influence my decision AT ALL.
In fact, it's more likely to negatively impact my purchasing decision.
Because here is a company that has excess profits to physical cold-advertise something to me, regardless if I have an interest in it or not.
What a waste of money, resources and time.
Some paper shipped across the country and shoved through my letterbox is not going to influence my decision AT ALL.
Oh, you and I are identical in that respect. Hate people trying to sell me shit. Am firmly from the "Don't call us, we'll call you.." department.
God's honest, in my late 20's I made the decision to turn my head when ads came on the TV, (refused to view them at all) and by the late 90's when high speed internet rolled out, we cut the cord.
No cable TV by 1999. Fully gone.
Within a few years, I'd found out how to use a hosts file (Dan Pollock's - it's still available) and blocked as much of the ad content I could on the computer. Now I'm rolling with uBO. (and still have Dan's hosts file enabled within it.)
My only exception is for food.
Where I live, we get lots of local grocery store flyers that are still printed on heavyweight newsprint so I'll often check out the produce sections or meat specials.. but that's about it.
Then those go into a stack that either goes to recycling or off to the schools or shops that use the paper - gladly - to pack merchandise for shipping. (bubble wrap has gotten ridiculously priced in the last few years)
The rest gets converted into notepaper or recycled.
Not really, no, because between letter and bulk mail mailbox delivery, the USPS derives much more revenue from bulk mail.
But, because most people just trash it, most companies have also stopped sending it.
Not what anybody was talking about.
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