There they stand, on one sturdy leg, a familiar yellow presence at every crossroads: Are French La Poste letter boxes doomed to disappear from our streets, like telephone booths? That’s the fate in store for them in Denmark, where PostNord has planned to retire its pretty red boxes bearing a postal horn and crown by 2025.

On Thursday, March 6, the joint Danish-Swedish service announced that it would deliver its last letter in Denmark on December 30, to concentrate on its parcel business. On January 1, 2024, PostNord lost its monopoly over mail delivery in the kingdom, as well as the financial compensation associated with universal postal duties. It drew the necessary conclusion. In Sweden, on the other hand, where the company continues to provide a universal postal service, mail delivery is being preserved.

In Denmark, the third most-digitized country in the world, according to the IMD World Digital Competitiveness ranking, mail volumes have collapsed by 90% since 2000, from 1.4 billion items to 110 million in 2024 (down 30% year-on-year). While 95% of Danes use digital postal services for their correspondence, 271,000 people, many of them elderly, receive their medical appointment invoices and other bills by post. The government has promised that private operators will take over. But competitive tendering has never been a good solution to remedy loss-making operations, except to charge a lot for stamps.

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