Shownotes Transcript
One of the world's oldest postal services will no longer deliver letters, ending a 400-year-old tradition. Hey there, everyone. This is Plain English for Thursday, March 27th, 2025. Here at Plain English, we tell stories to help you upgrade your English skills.
You get to listen to a story, learn new words, learn new ways of expressing ideas, and also learn something about the world too. I'm Jeff in Chicago for a few more days.
Thanks to JR, the producer, for letting me use his apartment as a temporary recording studio for a couple of months. I'll be back home in Mexico City soon, back to the warm weather and the spicy food. Today's story, Denmark is ending universal mail delivery.
The northern European country has one of the oldest postal services, and PostNord, the public company that delivers letters, will stop delivering letters as of December 30th, 2025.
This is episode number 761 of Plain English, so you can read the transcript, do the activities, and get some more English practice at plainenglish.com slash 761. Before we start today's story, I'd just like to remind you that the podcast is just one part of how we can help you upgrade your English skills.
At plainenglish.com, you can make faster progress with active learning strategies. You can take quizzes, do activities, listen to the fast version of the audio, watch video workshops, practice what you learn, and even join a live call with JR and me. It's all about helping you build your skills to become a better, more confident English speaker.
Sound good? Go to plainenglish.com to start your free 14-day trial today. Now, let's jump into today's story. Denmark's state-run postal service, Postnord, will stop delivering letters at the end of 2025. Denmark has one of the world's oldest postal traditions.
Its state-owned postal service was founded in the year 1624 by King Christian IV. It implemented fixed-rate stamps in 1851. Bright red mailboxes became a fixture on the streets of Copenhagen and in the Danish countryside.
In 2009, the Postal Service merged with Sweden's Postal Service to become PostNord, a public company owned by both countries' governments. For hundreds of years, the mail served as the backbone of communication in Denmark.
It brought royal decrees, official notices, and personal correspondence to Denmark's cities, farms, and dozens of inhabited islands. Like many countries, Denmark had a universal service guarantee.
That is a guarantee that letters would be delivered to every home and business in the nation on every working day for a fixed price. Postal guarantees are common around the world. France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States have some of the strongest universal service guarantees.
In any universal system, there are many, many money-losing routes. The hope is that government subsidies, high letter volumes, and profits from package delivery can make up for the high fixed costs of delivering to every mailbox in a country.
But Denmark's Postal Service has seen crippling declines in mail volume. In 2000, the service delivered 1.4 billion letters. By 2024, that number fell to just 110 million, a 90% drop.
Many Danes switched from traditional mail to email, SMS messages, and other digital ways of communicating. To make up for the low volume, the government had to increase the price of a stamp. But with every increase in price, fewer and fewer people chose to send letters, exacerbating the losses.
Now, it costs 29 kroner.
or about four US dollars to mail a letter in Denmark. That's a price few people are willing to pay. It is one of the highest rates in the world. In 2023, the Danish government abolished the Universal Service Guarantee, although PostNord continued to deliver letters across the country.
But in March of this year, 2025, PostNord announced it would end letter delivers entirely. Starting in 2026, the national government-owned mail service will only carry packages, not letters. This is big. PostNord didn't announce it was cutting routes or moving to once-a-week delivery.
It's getting out of the letter delivery business entirely. Starting in 2026, Danes will need to use a private delivery service if they want to send a birthday card to their grandmothers, an invoice to a customer, or a legal notice to another person.
Private courier services appear ready to step into the void for a price.
DAO, a private company, signed a contract with the Danish government to deliver official mail. The company says it is prepared to expand its service. But it's probably going to be more expensive and it may not deliver to every address in the country. Most people in Denmark will not mind.
Danes are among the most enthusiastic adopters of digital communication. But there are concerns that the elderly and people in rural areas will lose an important connection to the world. Many senior citizens still receive hospital appointment notices, pension information, and official letters by postal mail.
While some of those notices may still arrive by private courier, it's possible that the senders will switch to email and not everyone is comfortable communicating electronically. As for government correspondence, Denmark already has a system for delivering official notices via secure electronic delivery.
Companies and consumers will have to adapt. Most official documents like invoices, utility bills, and contracts are handled digitally. Most, but not all. Without a government mail service, paper correspondence will be much more expensive.
No other large country has eliminated its universal service guarantee due to declining mail volumes, so Denmark is the first. And given the economics of mailing a letter these days, it might not be the last. Still, many countries will find it hard to eliminate universal mail delivery.
The UK has explored going to alternate weekday delivery for some types of mail. Canada and New Zealand have both considered cutting delivery to just a few days per week. The U.S. Postal Service loses billions of dollars per year, and some people think it should be privatized or reformed.
But the U.S. has a strong tradition of postal mail. In addition to letters and correspondence, American households are bombarded with about 60 billion pieces of commercial paper mail every year, and the businesses that send mail would lobby hard against changes.
Japan has a strong social tradition of sending personal correspondence through the mail, like New Year's cards. Every country will have its own challenges, and not every country is as digitally advanced as Denmark is. Even so, I wonder how many countries will have universal mail in another 10 years.
So for those of you new to plain English, I'm from the United States and I moved to Mexico a few years ago. And one of the funny differences between the U.S. and Mexico is the mail.
In the United States, every address has a mailbox, every person has a mailing address, and every person gets mail. I mean every adult. The mail is just part of life. You can't avoid it. Most of it is commercial. We call it junk mail.
catalogs, flyers, solicitations, requests for donations, postcards from area businesses, but a lot of it is official business. We still get utility bills, bank statements, credit card statements, and legal notices by mail.
You can opt to get them digitally, but most companies and most government policies say you get them physically unless you choose otherwise. Now, Mexico is different. The mail exists. You can mail a letter from one person to another, but it's rare, and people don't check the mail every day.
When I moved into my apartment there, I asked where the mailbox was, and they looked at me like I had two heads. First of all, there is no mailbox, and second of all, nobody was going to send me mail. A lot of times documents like utility bills get delivered by a special courier, like from the electric company.
But I don't get a paper bank statement. I don't get a credit card bill. That's all online. So before, I would have wondered, how are Danes going to survive in a future without mail? But now I know it's possible.
Actually, I did get one piece of mail, exactly one piece in over two years of living in Mexico. It was a Christmas card from a friend in the United States. It arrived in April last year. Christmas card came in April.
Well, that's all for us here at Plain English episode 761. Thanks for making Plain English part of your English learning routine. And if you like the podcast, you'll love what we have for you on the website. Yes, you get the transcripts, but did you know that you also get translations built right into the transcripts?
And did you know there's a fast version of this audio so you can test your listening at full speed? It's all there, all that and more available to you at plainenglish.com slash 761. That's all for today. See you on Monday.
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