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Comment by ptaipale | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it is obvious that the previous writer just used wrong abbreviation, and meant the postal service.

Snail-mail is in trouble in most parts of the developed world, because online services have replaced so many processes that were running on paper.

Providing an example from my country and neighbours, i.e. the Nordics. Look at the graph that has numbers of delivered letters in different countries - it has roughly halved in 10 years, and the trend continues:

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284

Parcel deliveries are growing, but there the postal services have competition.

As the volume of letters decreases - particularly in businesses and offices but also in private lives - it becomes increasingly difficult to run the service without financial loss.

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Halving the number of envelopes does not imply increasing their transit time. If anything, it could actually speed them up... As for financial loss, it's a state-provided service. They are not created to make profits, but to provide a level of basic service. Just like primary schools, or local roads.

Halving the number of envelopes implies halving the revenue. As much of the cost is fixed (dependent on the size of infrastructure such as premises and vehicles, and number of delivery people required to cover a geographical area with sufficient service), this creates a rather impossible equation to solve without any deterioration of service.

A natural way in this situation is to make deliveries less often; we no longer need official letters urgently, except in quite rare exception cases that can probably be covered by parcel delivery services, with tracking (and much higher cost for the small number of deliveries).

Over here, the postal service tries to solve this by arranging deliveries only three times a week, and in future perhaps once a week. I find that quite acceptable. If information needs to reach me faster, it'll come on-line anyway. A week's wait is OK for legacy services where someone wants a piece of physical paper with my signature, written on a pen, on it.

Assuming price stays the same that means half the revenue, almost the same fixed costs and probably slightly lower marginal costs.

There is always a limit on how much money you can get from the government so they would have to save on expenditure with the decline.

It's nice to have but it can't be considered critical anymore. Bills, paychecks and other important mail needs to be delivered digitally, there's no turning back.

edit: parcels and legacy papers still need to work everywhere though and that is worth some public spending, but if you live in the middle of nowhere you have to accept longer deliveries on fewer days of the week.

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