In Germany mail was delivered two times a day, in the city district even more often, up until the 1960s.
Nowadays the mailpeople show up two times a week.
It blows my mind that they don’t pick mail up from peoples houses. I live in a city, so it could be different in more rural areas, but I my closest mailbox is almost a half kilometer away.
I mean if nothing else, the need for it has just utterly collapsed. Even in a largely still print-driven country like Germany.
Parcels, that’s an entirely different thing. And you will notice that DHL, UPS, they all do at-home pickup. Or DHL and Hermes have drop of spots in what feels like every single little kiosk, bakery or ice cream parlor.
But mail? Actual, proper, snail-mail? That’s mostly on the way out, actually. It’s no longer a big need for virtually anybody. Most people I know check their physical mailbox at most once a week, sometimes once a month (since invoices arrive monthly usually).
Yeah, I was a little shocked too.
Especially in apartment complexes. There’s usually a communal outbox for anyone to send out mail. But no, you’ll have to go all the way to a post office to drop off mail. The nearest one is a 20 minute walk for me.
That is crazy. In the USA they pick mail up at everyone’s house, and there are big mailboxes every couple of blocks.
Yeah, it’s kind of weird that this is one of the things the US got right compared to most other countries. If you’re already sending a guy to every house in town, why not pick up their mail while you’re at it.
But you need to wrap the letter or parcel and pay for postage anyway, so unless you’re regularly sending things it’s still easier just to go to a post office.
And that means the postie has to check every single house even if they don’t have any mail which slows things down a lot.
Britain still had this until early 2010s I believe, early post and late post. Daily in the city, not Sundays, is the norm now. You still find prioriry post boxes which are collected twice a day too
It certainly ended somewhere between 2001 and 2007. I remember where I was living when they stopped it.
When mail came twice a day, I used to get my post in the afternoon, consistently, and none in the morning, ever.
When they changed it, my post started turning up earlier, in the morning.
So it was weirdly an improvement. It seems strange now that there was ever two deliveries a day, given I get one letter a week at most now. (parcels are another matter, but again you don’t need Royal Mail delivering parcels twice a day even if you get a lot, so the fact they did this with letters is weird)
The original article by the NYTimes:
The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail) - By Randall Stross
