Danish postal service to stop delivering letters after 400 years | Denmark
The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter on December 30, ending a tradition of more than 400 years.
PostNord, which was formed in 2009 by the merger of Swedish and Danish postal services, announced its decision to stop delivering letters earlier this year, saying it would cut 1,500 jobs and remove 1,500 red mailboxes in Denmark due to the “increasing digitalisation” of Danish society.
Describing Denmark as “one of the most digitalised countries in the world”, the company said demand for letters had “fallen significantly” as online shopping continued to increase, leading to the decision to focus on parcels instead.
It took just three hours to buy the 1,000 private letterboxes, which had already been dismantled, when they went on sale earlier this month with a price tag of DKK 2,000 (£235) each for those in good condition and DKK 1,500 (£176) for slightly more worn ones. Another 200 will be auctioned in January. PostNord, which will continue distributing letters in Sweden, said it will return unused Danish stamps for a limited time.
Danes will still be able to send letters using delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark, but from January 1 it will expand its services from around 30 million letters in 2025 to 80 million letters next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao store to mail their letters or pay extra to have letters collected from home and pay the postage online or through an app.
The Danish postal service has been responsible for the delivery of letters in the country since 1624. There has been a sharp decline in letter sending in Denmark over the last 25 years, with a drop of more than 90%.
But evidence suggests a resurgence in letter writing among young people may be on the way.
Dao said his research found that 18- to 34-year-olds sent two to three times more letters than other age groups, citing trend researcher Mads Arlien-Søborg, who attributed the rise to young people “seeking a balance against digital oversaturation.” Writing letters became a “conscious choice,” he said.
According to Danish law, the option to send a letter must be available. This means that if Dao stops delivering letters, the government will have to appoint someone else to do it.
A source close to the transport ministry insisted there would be no “practical difference” in the new year; Because people would still be able to send and receive letters, they would just do it through a different company. They said any significance around the change was purely “emotional”.
But others said it was an irrevocable certainty. Magnus Restofte, director of the Enigma post at the telecommunications and communication museum in Copenhagen, said that if it is no longer possible to use digital communications: “It is actually quite difficult to go back [to physical post]. We can’t go back to the way it was before. “Also consider that we are one of the most digitalized countries in the world.”
Under the MitID scheme, Denmark’s national digital identity system used for everything from online banking to electronically signing documents to making doctor appointments, all official communications from authorities are automatically sent via “digital mail” rather than by post.
While there is the option to opt out and receive physical mail instead, very few people are able to do so. Today, 97% of the Danish population aged 15 and over is registered with MitID, and only 5% of Danes have opted out of digital mail.
Restofte said Danish people had been “quite pragmatic” about the change in postal services, as few people now receive physical letters in their mailboxes. Some young people have never sent a physical letter.
However, the scarcity of physical letters increased their value. “The funny thing is, the value of getting a physical letter is extremely high,” Restofte said. “People know that if you write a physical letter, you waste both time and money if you write it by hand.”
Kim Pedersen, deputy chief executive of PostNord Denmark, who announced their decision earlier this year, said: “We have been the Danish postal service for 400 years and so it is a difficult decision to tie the knot to this part of our history. Danes have become increasingly digital and this means that there are very few letters left today and the decline has continued so significantly that the letter market is no longer profitable.”
