united states postal service

Dead-Letter Danes

Denmark strikes me as a charming little country. It’s only half the size of South Carolina. The central town of Billund (pop. 7,300) is the birthplace of LEGO. The Little Mermaid – the famous waterfront bronze statue – honors the fairy tales of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. And the Viking warriors of Denmark’s past seem like cartoon characters compared to today’s warmongers. Now let’s add another reason to admire the Danes. By the end of 2025 their postal service will no longer deliver the mail.

Imagine walking out to your mailbox, dropping down the little door, and finding… nothing. Do you really have to imagine it? I can’t remember the last time my mailbox contained anything worth putting my hands on. It’s a daily pity-party pile in there: postcard ads, clothing catalogs, and random solicitations addressed to “Resident”. Christmas, birthday, and occasional thank-you cards are about the only personal touch we’re giving USPS anymore, and I speak as a baby boomer. The younger generations click keys instead of lick stamps.

Denmark discovered the obvious. Since Y2K their personal mail volume has dropped 90%. It’s pretty much the same as removing eleven eggs from the box of twelve. You used to deliver a dozen but now you deliver just one. Denmark’s Postal Service has been around for over 400 years so understandably a few of its citizens – seniors in particular – are upset about the quit. But are they really happy to pay 29 Danish krone (about $4.20) to mail a letter somewhere within their tiny country? That cost would have me turning to email as well.

Denmark is already beginning to remove its 1,500 public mailboxes, which got me to thinking. What will the U.S. do with all of our own mailboxes when our time comes? We have tons of the free-standing blue ones, where you pull open the door and drop in a letter. By my (questionable) math, since Denmark is half the size of South Carolina, and South Carolina is only 1% of the U.S. geography, we could have over 300,000 of these dead-weights just taking up space.

And what about the mailbox in front of your house? Remove it from its stand and then what? Oversized breadbox for the kitchen? Storage for a stack of small tombstones? Garage for Mini Cooper? The odd shape of traditional mailboxes just makes you want to melt them down for scrap.

It’s time for the U.S. to get on board with mighty Denmark and stop delivering the mail. UPS, FedEx, Amazon and a host of others now command package delivery. Any bill worth paying can be settled online. And for every twenty “circulars” my wife likes to leaf through, maybe one catches her eye with something she’d want to buy.

I can’t reconcile the fact that a letter to my niece way out in Hawaii or one to my neighbor right next door costs the same to mail: $0.73 for the first-class stamp. Maybe it’s why USPS reported a loss of ten billion dollars in 2024 alone. With that much red, the cost could be 29 krone (or $4.20, remember?) and it still wouldn’t make a profit. If you ask me, removing that particular debt from the federal budget sounds as sweet as… well… a cinnamon Danish.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #8

(Read about the start of this “church service” in Highest Chair)

Christian hymns sometimes refer to “tearing down the walls”. We were doing anything but tearing down at Notre-Dame de Paris today. Bags 12, 13, and 14… of 34 bags of pieces, had us beginning to surround the nave (the main space) with walls of stone, glass, and columns galore. The vertical construction progressed so quickly I swear I heard a parishioner cry, “Let us out! Let us out!”

Check out all those columns in the first photo. It’s like an army of soldiers took up residence in the cathedral, bracing themselves like Atlas for the weight of what is soon to be built above them. It’s a wonder the congregation can move about in the sanctuary without banging into a soldier here or there.

Today’s math lesson: multiples of seven. We built seven of this or fourteen of that, or in the case of those soldier columns, twenty-eight. And you know those Lazy Susan spinners the cake decorators use for frosting and such? I could’ve used one today since I built a little on the north wall, then switched to the south wall, then back to the north, and so on.

It’s a good thing I’m showing you the sanctuary looking down from above (feeling divine?) As you can see from the west end here – where the bell towers will soon rise – we’re already pretty well buttoned up. Settle in, all ye faithful; get comfortable. Those walls will continue to rise up around you.

Running build time: 6 hrs. 50 min.

Total leftover pieces: 26

Some content sourced from the BBC.com article, “Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Setting Little Booklets Free

In Breaking Away, the charming little movie about bicycling and broken dreams, there’s a scene where Barbara Barrie talks with her son about her passport. She’ll never really use it, she says, but she carries her passport all the time so she can present it proudly if ever asked. With newfound hindsight, I should’ve held onto my wife’s passport as tightly as Barbara Barrie held on to hers.

If you have a passport, you know the drill. Every ten years you have to renew the little book. The process is cumbersome, even online, because the authorities ask for almost as much information as they did the first time around. Everything goes into the (re)application except a copy of your birth certificate. Three pages of personal information later, you print, date, and sign, attach an unflattering black-and-white selfie (no smiling!) and mail it in together with your expiring passport.

So far so good with the hindsight. But as soon as I went to the post office last October I made a big boo-boo; the so-called fatal error. The desk clerk convinced me to send the application through regular mail. “Save your pennies”, I remember him saying. “After all, you’re sending through one government entity to another government entity. What could possibly go wrong?” So I saved my pennies… and that’s the last I ever saw of my wife’s passport.

Did this machine eat my wife’s passport?

Okay, maybe not ever. Perhaps the little booklet eventually finds its way home after completing whatever misguided tour it’s been taking. Or maybe, as our travel agent was quick to suggest, it was mangled and shredded by the sorting machine of an automated postal facility. Or maybe #3 – the one that has me staring at the ceiling into the wee hours of the night – it’s the latest identity of the head of an international drug cartel.

Laugh or feign horror at my expense, but you can’t blame me for wandering to the worst case scenario these days. The outside of the mailing envelope said “National Passport Processing Center” while the inside contained what obviously feels like a passport. Easy pickings, especially for an enterprising minimum-wage postal worker. My recurring thought: why didn’t I fork over the fifteen bucks for a secure, insured, overnight envelope? Because I’m cheap, that’s why. Ah hindsight, thee be a cruel character.

Not that you’ll ever need it (because you’re learning from me) but there’s an easy process to report a “lost or stolen” passport. You provide as much information as you can and if you’re lucky the authorities identify and “decommission” the missing booklet, reducing it to mere paper and plastic in the hands of another. But that still left my wife with no passport, which meant filing a new (not “re”) application. Dig out the birth certificate, take another photo, make an in-person appointment with the local post office, and pay another application fee. Mercifully, I watched that application get sealed into one of those secure/insured mailers before disappearing down the conveyor belt.

My first inkling of identity theft hit when our credit card company informed us of a $500 charge from a merchant in Germany, a company I didn’t recognize (and couldn’t begin to pronounce). My second inkling hit when our travel agent tried to make charges for the trip we needed the passports for, and our other credit card was rejected. One inkling makes you pause, but two inklings? That pushes the big ol’ panic button. But the god of credit cards must’ve been looking down on me favorably because the first charge was cancelled while the second charge was only denied because our travel agent had an old card on file. In other words – to my knowledge – we’re talking random events instead of identity theft.

There’s a happy ending to this story. (Actually, it’s more like an intermission since the authorities sent me a letter saying my wife’s passport is still lost or stolen until it’s not.) We have new passports now, which means no renewal process for another ten years. Our compromised credit card was cancelled and replaced. And we froze our credit in case a “new wife” out there tries to open accounts. I’m not convinced that’ll ever happen but I’m breathing easier as the months pass by. And rest assured, I’m keeping our little booklets secure so nobody can, you know, “break away” with them.

Supply Chain Reaction

My neighbor to the north – the one with a mansion lording over the rest of the hood from the highest point around – hosts equestrian events on weekends. Whether reining or cutting competitions, or “quaint” social gatherings, his barn and surrounds burst with dozens of horses and riders just about every Saturday. His property is large enough we’re pretty far removed from the hubbub, except the convoy of horse trailers and trucks barreling down the street beforehand. The wheels rumbling over the washboardy dirt road and balloons of dust floating high overhead are hard to ignore.

Maybe you don’t have a parade of horse trailers in your neighborhood (or a washboardy road), but guess what? You do have a procession of vehicles making their way to your driveway, and the list of participants is growing. Home delivery is the latest block party where everybody seems to have an invite.

In the 1970’s the only vehicles coming up our driveway were the red, white, and blue jeeps of the United States Post Office (USPS) or the brown, boxy trucks of the United Parcel Service (UPS). Then Federal Express vans (FedEx) joined in with a little purple and green, while DHL (the initials of the three founders’ last names) added a healthy dollop of yellow. Taste the rainbow!

That’s a pretty good line-up right there, but in the last decade or so home delivery (or “last mile delivery”, to use the trendier term) picked up several more players. Amazon (black vans with a blue “swoosh” on the side) and WalMart (several colors) extended their supply chain by adding home delivery trucks. Your pizza guy has been joined by restaurant delivery of all kinds, like DoorDash, Grubhub, and UberEats. AmazonFresh is competing with your local grocery store to make sure you consider home delivery of products from Whole Foods.

Here are a few of the more “colorful” entries coming soon to a driveway near you:

Postmates – Pizza, prescriptions, shoes, and tech products, just to name a few Postmates delivery favorites. What makes Postmates unique? They’re not affiliated with any business or product line. If you need it, they’ll find it.
LuggageForward – Boasts “doorstep pickup”, so all you worry about is transporting you from your home to your travel destination. LuggageForward guarantees your bags arrive before you do, and their “shipping experts” track your items every step of the way.
Piggybee – Just like LuggageForward, except you’re entrusting your luggage or other item to a random person who happens to be traveling to your destination anyway. Sounds a little dicey, but isn’t the name great?
Entrusters – The opposite of Piggybee, but the same concept. You find something you want to buy in a distant locale, and the random person who happens to be traveling to your city brings it to you.
goPuff – A “convenience store caterer”, tempting you with products like that pint of Ben & Jerry’s you don’t really need. Perfect for college students? Yes, and the company was started by college students. “goPuff”? No clue.
Drizly – Not only wine, beer, and liquor to your door inside of an hour, but also all the mixers, garnishes, and supplies you need to make your party tipsy. Hopefully you’re not the only one at the party. Hopefully your Drizly driver doesn’t partake in whatever he or she delivers.
Stitch Fix – A competitor to Nordstrom’s Trunk Club, Stitch Fix offers a stylist and all the designer clothes you could ever want. Try them on and keep ’em or return ’em within three days. Might as well close the doors on your local shopping mall.
Washio – Just what you would guess: home-delivery wash, dry, and dry-cleaning of your wardrobe. Your hamper just moved to the front door! Washio’s “ninjas” pick up and drop off inside of 24 hours, and even leave a cookie on top of the clean-clothes bag. Sadly, Washio lasted less than three years; it’s founders claiming, “sometimes you make it, sometimes you don’t”.

As we speak, many of these deliverers are hopping the fence into each other’s domains. Postmates is test-marketing convenience store items in New York City, sourcing from 150+ Walgreens and Duane Reades. Doordash is trying out same-day grocery delivery in 22 states. AmazonFresh distinguishes itself as food delivery with its lime-green (not black) vans.

With so many entrants in the home delivery circus, it’s fair to say the concept is still in its infancy. We’ll need several years to see who and what will ultimately come out in the wash (clearly, not Washio). But mark my words, you can always count on someone to rain on the parade. Amazon is already experimenting with “Prime Air”, a drone-service. In other words, home delivery may be a little less grounded in the future.

Some content sourced from the 10/2/19 Wall Street Journal article, “Postmates, DoorDash Want to Deliver Your Groceries, Too”.