We keep optimizing systems, but human life doesn’t necessarily optimize along with them.

When a society becomes fully efficient, people start craving the slow, the physical, the intentional.

Fifty years ago, I was given a coin bank styled after the red Danish Post letter box. That was in Solvang, CA. As these Danish immigrant-character communities (look also in Elkhorn, Racine, Greenville, etc) are little time capsules, you may have to travel to America to find a replica red slot to drop your letter.

The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract.

EDIT: maybe Royal Mail was never the Danish term, but I thought it was on a Lego set too...

So if I’m in Denmark and I want to send my friend a piece of paper with something written on it, what happens now?

I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.

Mail will arrive straight at the museum

It's been decades since I wrote a letter and mailed it.

So, all they did was privatize their postal service. There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company.

I doubt this will end well, but Denmark is a small country so maybe it will work.

After a year it would be nice to see stats and compare delivery time, lost mail, cost between Dao and the old service,

Will companies be willing to pay more to send junk mail if it is no longer largely subsidized? In this regard it could be a good thing assuming they don’t already have a regulation against junk mail there.

Just to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms:

Under law: DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring). But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.

Under government contract: DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.

Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service. The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"

When this came up earlier in the month (Denmark gets ready to cancel Christmas cards https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-rea... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079348) it seemed more like PostNord was just stepping back opening the market up to other 'rivals' to continue service.