loading . . . The End of Mail in Denmark ### Who will mourn the last letter?
#### FEBRUARY 17, 2026
When I was a child, I used to play a boardgame. It was called “The Children’s Post Office,” and strictly speaking it wasn’t a game at all, because there was no way to win or lose. Instead, you just had to imagine you were working at a post office. You could buy the boardgame in any toy store, and I think I got it from my parents. It included a little mailbox, as well as writing paper, envelopes, stamps, postal orders and — most importantly of all — a stamp for making postmarks. It made me feel very powerful to stamp things, because at that point in my life I didn’t yet know about class, and that a job as a postal worker confers neither power nor prestige.
There wasn’t much else you could do with “The Children’s Post Office,” but then again, it was a different time without iPads or excessive parental supervision. We were often required to entertain ourselves for extended periods. I could spend several hours playing post office in my room, and I became increasingly convinced that I would work for the postal service when I grew up. When I got a bit older, however, I began to watch _ER_ when I got home from school, so I decided maybe I’d be an emergency-room doctor instead and have lots of affairs at work.
I didn’t end up with a job in health care or the postal service. It’s probably a good thing I changed my mind about the latter, because on December 30, 2025, the company known as PostNord delivered the very last physical letter in Denmark. Actual, brick-and-mortar post offices no longer exist here. No more Postman Pat. No more dad jokes about kids “looking kind of like the mailman.” They’ve also removed the beautiful, distinctive-looking red postboxes from our streets. The only place you’ll find a postbox these days is in “The Children’s Post Office,” which for inexplicable reasons is still available for purchase. I think they might have added a fake ATM since I was a kid; these too are on their way to becoming extinct.
## They’re in a bit of a bind, really, the authorities, because they’ve spent the last 20 years phasing out cash and doggedly making it almost impossible to exist in our society without a smartphone.
PostNord is a state-owned company. Sweden owns 60 percent, Denmark 40 percent, and until 2023 they had a legal obligation to deliver letters in Denmark, even though delivering letters is an increasingly unprofitable business. The explanation is simple: In 2000, 1.44 billion letters were sent in Denmark, but by 2024 this figure had fallen to 122 million. In our digital world, that number actually still seems quite high to me, but then again, I did have an irate man knock unannounced on my door recently. He’d come to collect the 800 kroner ($120) I owed the gas company, having missed repeated reminders. When I checked my letterbox for the first time in nearly a year, I realized I had a series of letters from the gas company, increasingly curt in tone.
I was a bit annoyed. Why couldn’t they have just emailed me a bill, like a normal company? In Denmark we like to pat ourselves on the back because — according to the UN — we’re leading the global charge in digitalization, and we often make fun of Germany for, among other things, still using cash. That’s not something people do very much in Denmark these days, and if you do, people are going to assume you’re either on government welfare or dealing drugs. But now our government has started recommending that we keep cash aside just in case Russia decides to sabotage a vital internet cable, or to wage war more broadly. They’re in a bit of a bind, really, the authorities, because they’ve spent the last 20 years phasing out cash and doggedly making it almost impossible to exist in our society without a smartphone. And it’s not just Russia: Given the American authorities’ current contempt for Denmark, despite our many years of faithful service in their wars, it might not have been the best idea to put most of our infrastructure in the pockets of tech bros in puffer vests.**** Best case scenario, they’re thinking solely about profit. Worst case, they’re outright demagogues.
In Denmark, we’ve been talking a lot in recent years about the rise of a digital underclass in our otherwise flawless welfare state. It’s made up not just of older people and those living on the social margins, as one might expect, but also of people who work manual jobs, for example, and therefore haven’t previously needed to upload their entire lives into the digital space. Studies show that between 20 and 25 percent of Danes belong to the “digitally disadvantaged,”**** which means that they struggle to use the more than 100 digital platforms dedicated to public services now bogging down our society. Every Danish person has a “digital mailbox,” for instance, which we are required to check. If we don’t, we’re punished. Let me explain one way that this might happen: The Danish government withholds 12.5 percent of each individual’s salary. It’s known as “holiday money,” which to be honest I always thought was a little infantilizing, like we’re not capable of figuring out how to save up for our own holidays. Once a year, by a particular deadline, you have to apply to have it paid back into your account. One man missed a notification in his digital mailbox reminding him to apply to receive his own money (roughly 6,000 kroner, or $1,100), and as a result, the state simply decided to keep it.
Denmark has also recently added a new digital system for paying property taxes. This system has, among other things, managed to**** estimate the value of one man’s property at 44 million kroner ($6.9 million) above its most recent selling price — and taxed him accordingly. Another woman had to go round collecting taxes from her neighbors, because she was unfortunate enough to move into a home linked to an identifying number that Danish bureaucracy refers to as the “original property number.” The original property had long since been split up into 13 other units, but she was registered in the system as the owner of them all. The woman was later awarded 150,000 kroner (just under $29,000) by a private foundation for being “a sympathetic complainer.” (This foundation, Den Georgbruunske Fond, was created by an old, lonely man who wanted his secret fortune to go to people who “stubbornly fight for justice, decency and the less fortunate.”) So every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. There aren’t many situations when an entirely ordinary woman receives an award for just trying to get on with her life.
## You can, of course, still send a physical letter in Denmark, if you’re _really_ committed to doing so. A private company called Dao has taken over that part of the operation, but it’s become such a hassle (and so expensive) to get your hands on a stamp that it really isn’t worth it.
But getting back to PostNord: From now on, the company will focus exclusively on delivering parcels, which — and I say this with all due respect — it’s really bad at. Most of the time it doesn’t deliver your parcel because you “weren’t home,” which is easy to say if no one rings the doorbell. Only a month ago, my boyfriend had yet another nightmarish, Kafka-esque brush with PostNord, the upshot of which was that he never received the presents he’d bought online for his kids (on Black Friday, following the American model, like the canny consumer that he is). He ended up having to re-buy the same gifts in a physical shop for a much higher price, so maybe PostNord was just doing its part to prop up the ailing bricks-and-mortar retail sector. Again: Every cloud has a silver lining.
In fact, PostNord is probably almost the most-hated company in Denmark, surpassed only by DSB, which runs the trains. DSB is owned by the Transport Ministry and has a monopoly on the rail network. Its one job is to get people from A to B in a timely manner. Somehow, it can never quite manage that, but because it has no competition, it doesn’t need to do anything about it. There isn’t a single person in the country who doesn’t have some kind of DSB-related horror story. Trains canceled due to snow or rain or wind or heat, delays due to signal failure (it’s always signal failure). My tax rate is 55 percent, in case you were wondering.
You can, of course, still send a physical letter in Denmark, if you’re _really_ committed to doing so. A private company called Dao has taken over that part of the operation, but it’s become such a hassle (and so expensive) to get your hands on a stamp that it really isn’t worth it. It now cost at least 23 kroner ($3.60) to send a letter within Denmark (210 kroner if you want to make sure it’s delivered correctly), and 46 kroner if you want to send something “flat” like a postcard to another country.
Unfortunately, Dao has had a rough start. People have complained of delays in deliveries of important items like blood samples, and with an election coming up, politicians are concerned that Dao will fail to deliver the 4 million slips of paper that needs to reach voters ahead of election day. (In Denmark, voters receive a slip of paper with their name, address and social security number on it as a way of identification and must take this with them when they vote. It’s one of the very few things that are not digitalized in Denmark.)
If I’m being honest, I don’t really care about the demise of physical letters. I haven’t sent a letter since I was in fourth grade, when all of us kids were assigned a pen pal. If you were assigned a boy, you were out of luck, because all they ever wrote was “what’s up?” or “I’m fine.” Which is good preparation for communicating with a grown man, now that I think about it. I haven’t even sent a postcard since 2015, when I went on a road trip through the southern United States. I bought it at the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, which is still the most propagandistic place I’ve ever been.
Even so, I love writing letters. I find it easier to communicate my feelings in writing, so when I get into a fight with my boyfriend, he usually receives a letter afterward, because when we argue in person I just start to cry. A letter gives me the chance to edit my emotions. I can try to make them comprehensible to another person, and to myself, at my own pace. Sometimes it works as intended; other times, the written words come across more harshly than they were meant.
Then again, the durability of the written word can sometimes work in our favor. When we’re writing love letters, for example. “I love you” just feels more concrete in writing. It will endure forever. You can keep the letter, you can re-read it on the days when you’re at your lowest, and you can even publish the letters in book form, if you’re arrogant enough.
## Then again, I’m a hypocrite. I love my iPhone. I love that I don’t need to lug my computer around to do my job. I love that I don’t need my wallet, I love that I can find my way around and listen to music, and after my boyfriend’s most recent birthday, for which I wrote him a handwritten love letter, I decided _never again_.
When I write love letters and/or explanations of my intermittently bizarre behavior to my boyfriend, I generally send them either by email or via Facebook Messenger. I don’t send them through the post. I never have. Nor do I write letters to my friends who live abroad, because it’s not the method of delivery I value about letters — I never liked that they take longer to arrive through the post than through the ether. It’s not the existence of the words on a printed sheet of paper, either. It’s the words themselves.
These days it feels as though words are vanishing, as if they’re losing their value. The bulk of our communication with other human beings takes place in short emails riddled with middle-management jargon such as OOO, ASAP, FYI, EOD and so on. The meaning of a proverb or the spelling of a word, at least in Denmark, can change if enough people get it wrong enough times. More and more people are leaving school at 16 without being able to read or write, let alone write by hand. I don’t do much of that myself, of course, although it’s a discipline, I’d be sorry to see die out, probably because it’s always been there.
Then again, I’m a hypocrite. I love my iPhone. I love that I don’t need to lug my computer around to do my job. I love that I don’t need my wallet, I love that I can find my way around and listen to music, and after my boyfriend’s most recent birthday, for which I wrote him a handwritten love letter, I decided _never again_. Good God that was tough on the hand — especially if, like me, you’re not the best at keeping things concise. It took effort and thought, which not many things do these days, and even though I won’t be repeating the experiment, I think I missed putting effort into things.
I wanted to write this piece about the demise of the letter in Denmark, and I think that’s because I maybe do care, in the end. The disappearance of the letter reminds me that we live in a world where a conflict — or a nuclear war, for that matter — can be started with a single social media post. It reminds me that the days of playing post office in our childhood bedrooms are over. It reminds me that I live in a country that would be completely and utterly fucked if there was a power cut or an internet outage. But that’s probably just me romanticizing the past. No doubt I was bored out of my mind as a child. Maybe I would have been less lonely if I’d had an online community instead of a crappy penpal.
Either way, the old world isn’t coming back. Unless you go to Germany, of course. Not only do they use paper money but sending a letter there is four times cheaper than in Denmark. Maybe they got it right.
#### ✺ **Published in _The Dial_**
**FEBRUARY 23, 2026**
## Letter to the Editors
I loved this piece by Anna Juul. My first full-time job was emptying mailboxes in Copenhagen in 1988. The company Post Danmark was fully owned by the state, and a friend told me: It’s well paid and you only have to work half the time!
That suited me well, and we had a lot of fun. We would drive around and empty the mailboxes three times a day, at 4:30 pm, at 7:30 pm and then at 9:30 pm. That made it possible for the letters to be delivered all around Denmark the next day.
The faster we emptied the mailboxes, the more spare time we had for ourselves, so we drove like hell, racing our colleagues.
And then a few months ago they took down my local mailbox. This is what it looks like this very morning.
**— CHRISTINE HANSEN, Hundested, Denmark**
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