The forecast this morning referenced the possibility of sprinkles with a thirty percent chance of fifty mile per hour wind gusts, which sounded more like a prediction of what might happen at a children’s birthday party than a weather report, but kudos to the National Weather Service for coming up with a different way of saying it is, yet again, going to be dry and windy out here today.
To get a break from the wind, I thought I’d check the internet to see if I could find anyone in the northern hemisphere with a larger collection of empty Vegemite jars than me and while randomly visiting different websites, I was shocked to learn that the Danish equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service, PostNord, originally established in 1624 and owned 60% by Sweden and 40% by Denmark, delivered its very last physical letter to a Danish customer on December 30, 2025!
Because of a ninety percent decline in mail volumes since 2000 combined with the fact that almost all Danes now use digital mailboxes (known as ‘e-Boks’) for official communications, PostNord ceased delivering letters in Denmark and will only deliver parcels from now on.
There still appears to be a way for seniors unable to retrieve mail electronically to keep receiving paper letters from government agencies but these must now be delivered by expensive private sector sources and may eventually be phased out.
Denmark is the first county to do this and I wonder how many more will follow suit? And when?
France is already experimenting with making deliveries only every other day (UPS already does this out where I live), and several major countries, including Canada, Japan and Australia, don’t deliver mail on Saturdays.
I must admit that we don’t get very many real letters at our house these days. Certainly not many compared to the “olden days”. We do get a lot of solicitations and valuable opportunities to extend the warranty on cars, and bills of course, but not many flowery letters written with a fountain pen in violet ink, as in days long gone.
Some articles I noticed suggest that PostNord, by doing what it did, has successfully provided a road map for other nations like the U.S. to follow to end letter deliveries, and that had me wondering, what if the U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering letters tomorrow, what might change?
Well, for a start, that would put an end to Colorado and seven other states conducting elections entirely by mail. That would be a good thing because not only would it make elections more secure (many studies show mail-in elections are less secure) but it would also save Colorado money, and things will be tougher this year, purse-string wise, because of declining employment and thus the extra fragile nature of the state’s economy.
There were 4,023,910 active registrants on the Colorado voter roll in March who will automatically receive ballots for the primary and general elections this year. Printing and mailing ballots is expensive, especially because in Colorado so many ballots are sent to people who no longer live in the state.
I estimate that there could be several hundred thousands of these in 2026 because of a poorly managed (and methinks deliberately so) automatic voter registration process that in the absence of decent checks and balances seems to have duplicated registrations for around 0.42% of all voters, and sends them two ballots rather than one. And I see from a report I have access to that there are currently 21,807 former residents who, despite filing a permanent change of address form with the post office (these go to the Colorado Secretary of State as well) and moving to a different state, are still scheduled to get ballots sent to their old Colorado addresses this year.
(And I better not mention the fact that 231 individuals on the Colorado voter roll have Danish mailing addresses.)
Will a day come soon when the U.S. Postal Service stops delivering letters?
The Postal Service is mandated by law to provide universal service so for that to change with regard to letters, Congress has to pass legislation (ha!) but because the Postal Service funds itself and receives no taxpayer support, then logically as the volume of letters continues to fall, it will naturally cost more and more to mail them (the law of supply and demand!) and thus less likely for people to send many letters in the future.
It is highly likely that increasing costs will doom letter deliveries in the U.S. before any new legislation does but either way, the times they are definitely a-changing, and either of my two readers might want to write that down somewhere, just in case they forget.
