Danish post - 1 km per day
Our friends, Thomas and Jane, sent us a Christmas card on December 19. It arrived today, February 2.
The address was absolutely correct. So was the postage. Why did this letter take six weeks to cover a fairly short distance? Who knows? - it just plunked into our mailbox unannounced.
Six weeks to make a journey of 30km!
The Danish postal authorities have been under press for years - first because of the fax, now because of e-mail. The short and the long of it: people send fewer letters. Not surprisingly, there's been talk that the Danish postal service will be bought up by a larger organization - the German postal authorities, for example.
In the meantime, here in Copenhagen, we now have TWO postal services: the official Danish government sanctioned service and CityMail, a private carrier.
So how are the Danes reacting to decreased traffic and increased competition? By reducing the number of folks manning the counters in post offices, by installing centralized automatic package dispensers so the carriers don't need to actually deliver stuff to individual addresses, by raising the postal rates - and, seemingly, by distributing second-class mail (Economique) at their leisure.
What a way to run a business...
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