Europe loves to clown on the US for a lack of social services, but the postal service is where it’s reversed. In almost all of Europe, postal services are provided by private companies, with no public option. I guess the US was created at just the right time to recognize the benefit of a government postal service (thanks, Ben Franklin).
I am American, and not the previous commenter, but a quick Google and Wikipedia search seems to indicate that Germany, Denmark, The UK, Malta, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have all privatized their mail services. The reddit posts from years ago about it seem to indicate that most of the people who remember the state owned service preferred the state owned post to private post services.
So not all of Europe, but a decent amount of Western Europe seems to have privatized their post. I didn’t see anything about Spain, Portugal, Greece or Italy, but as I said it was a quick glance around.
According to Wikipedia the shared Swedish/Danish postal service is shared 60%/40% by the Swedish and Danish governments respectively, so im not sure how privatised it is really if it’s completely owned by government.
“The owners of PostNord Group are the state of Sweden (60 percent) and the Ministry of Transport of Denmark (40 percent).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord
Europe loves to clown on the US for a lack of social services, but the postal service is where it’s reversed. In almost all of Europe, postal services are provided by private companies, with no public option. I guess the US was created at just the right time to recognize the benefit of a government postal service (thanks, Ben Franklin).
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I am American, and not the previous commenter, but a quick Google and Wikipedia search seems to indicate that Germany, Denmark, The UK, Malta,
Sweden, Norway,and Finland have all privatized their mail services. The reddit posts from years ago about it seem to indicate that most of the people who remember the state owned service preferred the state owned post to private post services.So not all of Europe, but a decent amount of Western Europe seems to have privatized their post. I didn’t see anything about Spain, Portugal, Greece or Italy, but as I said it was a quick glance around.
According to Wikipedia the shared Swedish/Danish postal service is shared 60%/40% by the Swedish and Danish governments respectively, so im not sure how privatised it is really if it’s completely owned by government.
“The owners of PostNord Group are the state of Sweden (60 percent) and the Ministry of Transport of Denmark (40 percent).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord
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Fair enough, I was extrapolating from a comment from a Finn who indicated that they privatized their post and handed it over to PostNord
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