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One of the truly meaningful achievements of our civilisation has always been a functioning postal service, ideally with daily delivery of letters and parcels. Greeting cards, bills, job applications, online orders, medicine deliveries, and for some time now even baked goods and fresh meat – sent today, delivered tomorrow. That's how we knew it. And that's how we love it.
Until 1 January 2025. From this date onwards, a new postal law will come into force, bringing with it many changes. As a first step, we will have to adjust to longer postal delivery times. In future, 95 per cent of standard letters will have to arrive on the third working day, and 99 per cent on the fourth working day. Official and court correspondence shall no longer be deemed to have been delivered on the third working day after posting, but only on the fourth working day.
That is the theory as regulated by law. But what is the reality? It is not uncommon for letters to be delivered after being in transit for much longer – sometimes several weeks. Television magazines for consecutive weeks arrive in the letterbox on the same day, which means that the earlier issue was in transit for a whole week longer than the other. Urgently awaited documents take much longer than expected. Appointments are missed as a result. There is real chaos in the postal service's delivery system.
Does this also apply to parcels? The German and international parcel business is operated under the DHL brand. Anyone who frequently receives parcels delivered by DHL will be familiar with emails like this:
Hello (name),
Yours DHL parcel (YW) The programme will be sent to you.
today between 12:05 and 13:35
delivered by your letter and parcel delivery service.
However, emails like this are becoming increasingly common:
| Hello (name), Unfortunately, during transport, your DHL parcel (YW) broadcast to delays. Your new estimated delivery date is (new delivery date). We apologise for any inconvenience. |
If we take a closer look at the development of postal delivery times, it makes sense to distinguish between letters and parcels. Various competitors have established themselves in the parcel business – UPS, DPD, GLS and Hermes, to name but a few. Some of them not only deliver faster, but also transport heavier and bulkier parcels than DHL and offer business customers flexible and easily calculable rates. Collection points have sprung up like mushrooms in recent years. Everyone has a parcel shop somewhere near them: at the petrol station, the lottery ticket office or the dry cleaners. There are now probably more parcel shops belonging to competitors than post offices. In short, the „parcel delivery“ service is available everywhere in Germany. However, if you want to send an urgent shipment with DHL, your only option is express delivery. This works reliably from one day to the next, and you can even book a delivery time as an optional extra. However, this comes at a price: for example, 10 kg costs a whopping £31. But as I said, there are alternatives to DHL... Not an easy market environment for the Post subsidiary.
The situation is different when it comes to letter delivery. Deutsche Post AG still has a monopoly in this area. And it will most likely retain this monopoly, because with the number of letters to be delivered declining, hardly any competitor will voluntarily enter this labour-intensive market. However, we wanted to find out more about the current delivery times for letters. That is why we conducted our own experiment.
The author of this article lives in the countryside. Here, it feels like there are only two or three deliveries a week by post. For a week, we sent a letter every day (except Sunday). It was always posted in the same letterbox, before it was emptied, of course – in a small town with just under 10,000 inhabitants. It was always addressed to the same address in a village about 10 km away from the post box where the letters were posted. Our primary aim was to test the delivery service, not the logistics of delivery over hundreds of kilometres. These are the results of the six test letters:
3 letters were delivered on the following working day. (Well done, Deutsche Post!).
Two letters were delivered on the next working day.
One letter took three working days to reach the recipient.
Three days for 10 kilometres? Of course, it used to be better. Now let's imagine that we're not sending these letters over 10 kilometres, but over 1,000, e.g. from Flensburg to Passau. And all without air transport – by land, as in the old days. But we'll come back to that later in this article.
The great transformation
In January 2020, former Chancellor Merkel spoke at the World Economic Forum about the „great transformation“. Did she mean digitalisation in all areas of life? If more and more items are to be sent online, do we even need a postal service anymore? Is it even a case for liquidation? Will the 600,000 employees soon have to look for a new job?
Let's take a look north to our neighbours in Denmark. They are already one step ahead. From 1 January 2026, the Danish postal service will completely discontinue letter delivery and public post boxes will be removed. This process has been in preparation for years. Postage has become significantly more expensive, with a standard letter within Denmark currently costing four euros and a holiday postcard to Germany costing 6.70 euros – a real luxury! Citizens are being forced into digitalisation, so to speak. However, parcel deliveries will continue in Denmark. For the time being.
Would Germany be prepared for an imminent end to postal delivery?
On 23 March 2025, Focus Online already sounded the requiem for letter delivery in Germany: „It won't be long now: the post office is closing down – soon in our area too!“, That was the headline. Deutsche Post is still denying it. But the dismantling of the postal delivery logistics system began at the latest with the discontinuation of night flights in spring 2024. For 62 years, the postal service had transported letters by plane over the long north-south distances to Berlin, Stuttgart, Hanover and Munich. Now, transport is exclusively by land, which naturally takes much longer.
Admittedly, there is also an irreversible trend towards digitisation in Germany and the accompanying shift to digital messaging and document delivery. But here, the transition is rather tentative and hesitant – typically German, in other words. This is best illustrated by the sending of invoices. When email slowly established itself as a serious alternative to physical letters in the 1990s, this did not initially apply to the sending of invoices. According to the law, these still had to be sent by post. Then online delivery was permitted, but only with cumbersome certificates to guarantee authenticity. Today, no one asks for such a certificate anymore. On the contrary: since 1 January 2025 MUST Companies will soon be able to send e-invoices as well as receive them – this is required by law. Today, around five months later, practically nothing has changed in terms of how invoices are sent. Companies in Germany continue to send their invoices physically by post or by normal e-mail with a PDF invoice attached, as before. Office software developers are slow to create the technical requirements for e-invoices as part of updates. Many companies are relaxed about the deadline extensions for sending e-invoices. Many have already learned to „sit it out“ from former Chancellor Kohl.
The importance of the postal service for the economy and society
Nowadays, the postal service is an important part of everyday life. It makes it easier for us to maintain social contacts, conduct business and disseminate important information. It is a significant component of communication, a support for everyday life and an important factor in business.
Until 1995, Deutsche Bundespost, as it was then known, was a state-owned enterprise. The delivery of letters and parcels was – like telecommunications – a service guaranteed by the state. With the second postal reform, the postal service was converted into a listed public limited company. The „Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunications“ had served his purpose by 1997. The last person to hold this office was Wolfgang Bötsch (CSU). Although the new Deutsche Post AG was still obliged to provide a basic delivery service, this did not change the fact that the postal service was now a commercial enterprise that had to at least cover its costs and face free competition. Thirty years after Postal Reform II, Deutsche Post still has a monopoly in the letter business.
A look at the history of the postal service
The idea of people exchanging messages with one another is ancient. Early forms of communication are closely linked to the invention of writing around 5,000 years ago. The ruling houses of ancient civilisations – the Babylonians and Egyptians, and later the Greeks and Romans – began systematically exchanging messages. Initially, these were conveyed orally by messengers. Anyone who has ever played „Chinese whispers“ knows what can sometimes happen. Then the (sealed) letter was invented, making it possible to exchange written messages across time and space.
The first regulated postal service then developed in the Roman Empire. On foot and on horseback, a sophisticated transport system began to exchange messages, goods and people over thousands of kilometres. „Relay stations“ were established at intervals of one day's journey, where riders and mail coaches could change horses. In addition, there were post stations located in larger towns and cities, which also offered food and accommodation.
However, the necessary rest breaks for humans and animals significantly delayed the delivery of messages from rulers. The Romans therefore invented so-called relay stations, i.e. posts along a route, so that a letter could now be transported without interruption. The courier at each relay station simply passed it on to a messenger who was already waiting. The arriving messenger could now rest, but the message was transported on without interruption. The basic principle of the postal service was born and went down in history like many other infrastructural achievements of the Romans – such as roads, aqueducts, sewer systems, ports and fortifications.
In the centuries that followed, there were no fundamental developments in postal transport. It was not until the Thurn und Taxis dynasty that another logistical breakthrough occurred. During the 16th century, the Thurn und Taxis postal service was commissioned to transport the imperial courier mail in the Holy Roman Empire. Letters were now transported regularly and reliably and were affordable for large sections of the population. At the heart of this new postal system was the revival of the Roman relay stations. The Thurn und Taxis family covered Europe with a network of post offices and stations. Letters from Brussels – the headquarters of the Thurn und Taxis postal service – to Innsbruck were to be delivered in five days in summer and six days in winter. The journey from Brussels to Paris was expected to take only 44 hours, to Lyon four days, to Granada 15 days and to Toledo 12 days.
The new postal service revolutionised communication within Europe. Suddenly, space and time no longer seemed like insurmountable obstacles. The Thurn und Taxis family guaranteed the secure and, by the standards of the time, extremely fast delivery of imperial mail and the confidentiality of correspondence.
In recent history, the postal service has played an increasingly important role, but has changed significantly over time. However, it was not until the introduction of postage stamps in the 19th century that mass communication between people around the world became possible. The world's first postage stamp was sold in May 1840: the legendary „One Penny Black“ featuring the profile of the Queen. The first German stamp was the „Schwarze Einser“ (Black One), which was issued on 1 November 1849 in the Kingdom of Bavaria. For almost two centuries, stamps adorned billions of letters and tens of millions of collectors around the world were on the hunt for these small, fascinating „mirrors of society“. Today, stamp collecting has gone out of fashion – probably also due to the introduction of self-adhesive stamps that cannot be removed from the envelope. Even today's QR codes on stamps are not necessarily a feast for the eyes and probably dealt the final blow to philately.
Is the post office dispensable today?
No. Not everything can be digitised with the current state of technology and law. Contracts, for example, require original signatures. What if the contracting parties are hundreds of kilometres apart? No problem: one party signs the contract, sends it to the other by post, and the other party sends the signed contract back. How would that work without the postal service? Online? Do we start with certificates again? That didn't work with invoices. Let's also think about sending out election notifications and postal voting itself! Our democracy is based on the principle that every eligible voter can vote, regardless of where they are. Yes, there may be ways to vote digitally. But it will probably take decades – at least in Germany – before the legal and technical requirements for this are in place for every household. Until then, we will need our good old postal service. The Danes may do things differently.
Incidentally, this also applies to parcel delivery. Nowadays, many items are simply ordered online and then delivered by parcel. Some of these are perishable goods, such as sausages, fresh meat, bread and the like. Entire industries have only been able to emerge because there are logistics companies that can deliver nationwide within one or two days. It is only through the ability to send parcels across the country, Europe and worldwide in the shortest possible time that companies have been able to tap into a supra-regional customer base. Will the Post Office, or its parcel subsidiary DHL, still be able to compete in this time-sensitive business in the future?
How is Deutsche Post dealing with the changing market environment?
First of all, it is striking that many outgoing postmen, e.g. because they are retiring, are no longer being replaced. A postman who is retiring in the summer of 2025 told us that his delivery district, which is now „becoming vacant“, will be divided among the other postmen. These will now have even larger delivery districts, which is likely to further extend the delivery times for letters, as the respective delivery rounds always end at the end of the working day, regardless of whether there are still letters in the vehicle or not. Tomorrow is another day – mañana, as they say in southern Europe...
In retrospect, the last few decades have also been marked by unfortunate corporate decisions made by management boards. First, there was the abandoned fantasy of becoming a global powerhouse, „Deutsche Post World Net,“ which ultimately merged quietly into the DHL brand. Then there was the sell-off of the family silver, Postbank, which was sold in several stages, along with its customers, to Deutsche Bank. And finally, there was the electric car disaster. The company probably wanted to be hip and green, the CO2-Reduce carbon footprint. The manufacturer of the „Streetscooter“ electric delivery vehicles struggled through insolvency, and now production is to be moved to Thailand. The future is uncertain. There have even been reports from Austria that postal delivery drivers had to turn off the heating in their cars and freeze in order to save electricity, as otherwise the batteries would run out during their rounds. The electric car experiment will hardly have been any different in this country. The future remains open.
In summary, it is fair to say that the former monopolist has squandered its market position without any real necessity. Many of the 600,000 employees are likely to view the future with mixed feelings. And not without reason.
Further sources:
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/deutsche-post-kein-brief-mehr-mit-flugzeug_id_259808859.html
https://logistik-heute.de/news/kep-daenische-post-stellt-briefzustellung-komplett-ein-202192.html
https://www.planet-wissen.de/gesellschaft/kommunikation/post_und_briefmarken/index.html
https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/guenther-schuh-streetscooter-b-on-insolvenz
