Postal Arbitrage
walzr.com
walzr.com
A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...
Win everything you need from sweepstakes!
I think you meant to say "operate in a market that is regulated in precisely the way they want it to be".
Personally, I don't believe that free markets are a sensible way to manage local affairs. They work well on a medium scale, where goods are fungible and efficiency matters: but for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant. I don't think it's sensible to expect the local pizza place to be free of arbitrage opportunities. Someone who identifies and exploits such opportunities (e.g. "free meals available on request") would be taking advantage of goodwill, and the reason we can't have nice things. However, if a large corpo comes along and starts trying to undercut the locals, absolutely mug them for all they're worth: they're playing a different game, and it's not one you should want them to win.
I'm not sure why you think that. "Market participant" doesn't mean "always takes the lowest priced deal". People are willing to pay higher prices for food from local restaurants, as opposed to chains, fast food, etc., because they feel that the extra value they are getting (better quality, knowing the people who make the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant, etc.) is worth it. That's a free market.
What is not a free market is large corporations who get all kinds of government favors to prop them up coming in and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities that the locals don't have the time or the energy to protect against--still more if such opportunities involve "marketing" the locals' products in ways the locals didn't agree to, and would not agree to if they were given the opportunity to make a choice. I completely agree with you that such things should be shut down.
A bit of a tangent, but price transparency is another factor.
At least when economists publish their "it's the bestest and most efficient option" analyses their definition involves perfect information: No secret prices, no non-disclosure agreements, everybody knows what was paid for inputs and labor, etc.
I bring this up because there is an unavoidable conflict between "the market that moves freely as a whole" version versus "the market where I'm free to keep secrets."
Feels tangentially related to the No True Scotsman fallacy, but with the premise flipped?
Yes, agreed. One obvious place in the US where that is a huge problem is health care.
It doesn’t benefit the market to make plumbing contracting a national business, for example.
Early on they stopped prohibiting restaurants from upcharging, so restaurants all did. They ended up with some extra sales and profits. The customer got VC funded free delivery.
Enough alternatives kept the market place efficient. DoorDash can’t get too abusive when UberEats and Instacart are competing, restaurants have no switching cost.
The whole thing worked for basically everyone involved except maybe the investors (DoorDash has significantly underperformed the S&P since it debuted on the market.)
From my side, as someone old enough to remember Domino's running the "there in thirty minutes or it's free" promotions... These delivery services absolutely tanked the quality of delivery.
Now you can basically only get slow delivery of over priced, cold food. Sure, you can get it from far more places, but it's a pyrrhic victory if I've ever seen one.
Used to be if a restaurant offered delivery, it was ok food for delivery, at ok prices, and their drivers had gear to keep it warm and presentable.
Now we basically only do pick up because these universal delivery companies suck at the one fucking thing they're supposed to do. But they've run all the local restaurants out of the delivery game.
Order A,B,C - receive only A+B, or A,B,D. No explanation. Tipped generously.
For a long time, I myself drove and picked up my orders. The same restaurants rarely made mistakes. I never had to ask for missing item to be included. They always had everything in the bag.
It’s happened so often, it has to be malice from one of the parties involved.
You shouldn't tip delivery drivers, it's literally their job.
There is a loser born every minute. (The loser has no choice in been born, though)
Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience. Anything else I either pick it or go without.
It was also shady how they paid for ads to supplant the phone numbers on Google so you were calling Door dash instead of the food place.
Same. It’s about the only reason why I order from Dominos occasionally. But last week it got delivered by Uber even though I ordered directly on their website. It also took 45 minutes to get delivered instead of the usual 10. So now the only Uber-free delivery I can get is a Japanese restaurant.
I don’t know of any restaurants that previously had delivery of their own and switched. I’m sure they exist but it’s vanishingly small, for the reasons outlined.
So all DoorDash does is give you the consumer more options. If you don’t like it, you don’t use it and nobody is harmed.
Only a small percent of restaurants delivered in the first place outside of the ones like pizza that still do.
Used to be that just about every chinese food and pizza place would deliver. Now it's all gig app BS unless it's a massive order.
Yes, I assume that this is what happened.
> I don’t know of any restaurants that previously had delivery of their own and switched. I’m sure they exist but it’s vanishingly small, for the reasons outlined.
I know a couple. But the reason why none of the pizza places around here do delivery (apart from Domino's, usually) is not that they stopped doing it. It's that these businesses have a relatively short life expectancy, and the ones that open don't have drivers and instead rely on Uber or equivalent. And I really mean that no pizza place handles delivery themselves. I checked. Quite thoroughly. Some Asian restaurants do have drivers but even then, it's not a given.
> So all DoorDash does is give you the consumer more options. If you don’t like it, you don’t use it and nobody is harmed.
The option is Uber, Deliveroo, or walking to the place (driving there is not practical because of the limited parking space). The result is that we do it less often and when we do it it's more expensive or cumbersome. I am willing to accept that it's different where you live but here the days of free delivery are mostly over.
>Only a small percent of restaurants delivered in the first place outside of the ones like pizza that still do.
Where I live about half of the non-chain restaurants offered delivery service. In addition to places like Domino's. Now, it's only Domino's and Jimmy Johns that have delivery of their own. I've talked to multiple owners / managers that complained how DoorDash and maybe Uber eats literally listed phone numbers under their name and paid for top ad spots and middle manned call in orders using their own drivers. So much so to the point that staffing for drivers wasn't feasible.
This is so much the polar opposite for me.
First of all: restaurant discovery. With a phone interface you have to somehow out of band learn that there is a place who delivers to you, that they are open and obtain their menu. With an app no matter where you are it gives you a list of places which are open and deliver to you.
Second is that you have all the time to browse the menu, do your research, contemplate, hand a phone around among many people, see your order, check your order, change your order, change your mind mid order. With a phone call a fast talking rushed person who often doesn’t speak the language natively talks to you from a noisy kitchen. And they expect you to get on with it fast because you are holding up the line. You better already know what you are ordering and be ready to make decisions about any substitutions as they come up.
Then comes the payment. With apps I’m only trusting my payment details to a large company who has the engineering resources to make the transaction secure. With a phone order you either pay to the delivery driver (does he accept card? Do i have enough cash if not?) or you read in your card details to the phone. Which is just bonkers unsecure on so many levels.
Then comes the tracking: with the app i see when the food is ready, and where the driver is in the delivery with a continously updated ETA. With a phone? You can call them again if the food does not show up I guess. Good luck.
Then comes the handover. With the phone if the food was pre-paid the delivery driver just gives the food to whomever. If it is paid on delivery they give it to whomever pays them. Hope it reaches you. With the apps i’m using the app displays a one time code which the driver ask for to check that you are who ordered.
Every element of the experience is better with an app in my opinion.
> and they could give you updates on when they were out of something
So can they through the app. But instead of telling every single costumer about what they are out of they just click it once on their admin and the items in question are stricken through in the menu. I see that all the time.
But they also could have just raised prices on everything but the cheap one DoorDash was using for pricing.
The pizza itself can be literally given away (although if not on the premises, then presumably a box would be required.)
(Complete with "chill bro, I was just <s>joking</s>demand testing you" at the end)
The blogger calls this being "tricked" to sign up for DoorDash. Seems to me, this is the same way a burglar "tricks" you into giving them your valuables.
You only need to specify the name and address of the registered agent, which is sort of a "contact person", not somebody who works for the company.
https://www.delawarebusinessincorporators.com/blogs/news/can... and https://velawood.com/anonymity-in-delaware/
The US is
They banned him eventually.
I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.
Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.
I guess it's a bit like postal arbitrage, if I accept the cost of greeting cards themselves as part of the cost of the activity.
To the extent that anyone has commented much, those who have commented had very positive reactions to what amounts to a book recommendation and a copy of the book I'm recommending along with a little note.
Would you like to accept the charges?"
Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!
Classic Dutch privatization
So it appears to be privatised but with strict government regulations.
Letter, no. 61 cents is the post card rate, so you can send a post card thousands of miles for that. If you introduce an outside envelope its 78 cents to mail that thousands of miles, up to 1oz.
>the USPS faced financial difficulties, posting losses of $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and $8 billion in fiscal 2024, leading to a request for $14 billion in government assistance.
It would appear that the USPS operates at a loss at these prices
https://www.usps.com/international/first-class-mail-internat...
Why yes, I am fun at parties.
Container ships use ~0.015 kWh per ton-km[1] and a car is ~1.35 kWh/km.
If you go to the store and end up getting >10 things it becomes "worth it" from an energy standpoint. Anything less printing at home seemed to be more economical... Not an expert though just saying it opened my eyes to how inefficient "last mile delivery" energy consumption is.
[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c15/page_95.shtml (old reference)
One of the oddities of home shopping and delivery is that it can be more efficient.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5020321/food-delivery-m...
> In 2022, researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. modeled a single 36-item grocery cart to compare greenhouse emissions from an e-commerce grocery delivery and a traditional trip to the store to get the same items. Gregory Keoleian and colleagues at the university's Center for Sustainable Systems found that using an electric vehicle to pick up groceries could cut emissions by as much as half, compared to a gas-powered vehicle.
> They also found that home delivery could be an even better option. That's because with a delivery vehicle, orders are often clustered, with a driver dropping off not just your groceries, but also hitting neighbors during the same run. "Delivery is actually going to be more efficient in general than driving yourself in a gasoline SUV to the store to pick up your groceries," Keoleian says.
The mentioned paper is https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/car...
---
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-more-people-bought...
> A recent USDA survey found that in 88% of U.S households, people hop in their car to buy groceries, driving an average of 4 miles to their preferred store. ... All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store.
---
https://csanr.wsu.edu/how-do-grocery-and-meal-kit-deliveries...
> While it is common for the consumer to associate convenience in the food industry with increased greenhouse gas emissions, this is not always the case. Results from a 2013 University of Washington study indicate that grocery delivery has the potential to reduce carbon emissions anywhere from 20 to 75 percent (Ma 2013), while another study out of Finland found the potential for grocery delivery to reduce emissions by up to 87 percent (Siikavirta et al. 2002).
---
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/shop-online-sustaina...
> Buying goods online can be better for the environment than in-store shopping for one fundamental reason: With online shopping, a single truck or van can replace multiple car trips, by multiple households, to stores. It helps to think of it this way: In most of the United States, almost every purchase means putting a vehicle on the road—either your own or a delivery company’s.
---
Some others:
https://blog.sevensenders.com/en/ecommerce-carbon-footprint-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250302115526/https://sustainab... (this one is quite comprehensive also including the difference in packaging)
And those articles come with their own citations to other articles.
With online shopping and delivery, the warehouse can be a dark, cramped, hot, robot-filled pandemonium in the worst part of town.
Tom Scott - How many robots does it take to run a grocery store? https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE (grocery fulfillment centers are different than Amazon)
... It's also coldish. https://youtu.be/w2HnKpTo2So
USDA study: >Overall, households are, on average, 2.2 miles from the nearest SNAP-authorized supermarket or supercenter, but their usual store is 3.8 miles away.
Based on these questions: >This report presents initial findings from the FoodAPS survey on three key questions:
1. How do shoppers travel to their main store and how far do they travel to get there?
2. In what type of store (eg., supermarket, mass merchandiser, convenience store) do U.S. households typically shop for groceries?
3. Do store and travel mode differ by participation in food assistance programs or food security status?
This can only tell us the distance to the store and does not support "All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store."
In order to draw that conclusion, you need to show that the travel to and from grocery store was single purpose. Which is not supported by the data.
Most people I know don't go out of their way to go grocery shopping nor do they take specific trips to do so. It will be done in conjunction with another outing or when returning from work.
This could also! explain the reason that food secure people travel greater distance, as they tend to travel greater distance overall they choose a location closer to their travel route rather than their dwelling.
> While nearly three-quarters of the world’s cargo is carried by ocean-going ships, road vehicles like trucks and vans make up the majority, 65%, of freight’s emissions. Most ships burn fossil fuels and emit carbon, but they carry large amounts of freight at the same time, making them the most efficient way to move cargo. Road freight, however, can emit more than 100 times as much CO2 as ships to carry the same amount of freight the same distance. Road transport is also a fast-growing sector—80% of the global increase in diesel consumption can be attributed to trucks. E-commerce and home delivery are two reasons for this growth.
Perhaps trains beat road transport efficiency to a similar degree.
also, fuel is a huge cost (maybe even the main cost), and drag has a >linear relationship with speed- so the ships will slow down based on fuel prices.
Not just efficiency but you can use electric trains if your tracks are electrified. Add into that electricity production system that is mostly renewable+nuclear (the Nordics for example) and you get very very low emissions.
+----------+------------------------+---------------+----------+----------+
| Mode | Freight (bn tonne-km) | CO2 (Mt) | CO2/Frgt | Vs. Sea |
+----------+------------------------+---------------+----------+----------+
| Air | 303 | 155 | 511 | 79 |
| Rail | 10,842 | 170 | 15 | 2 |
| Road | 26,807 | 2,230 | 83 | 12 |
| Sea | 101,486 | 657 | 6 | 1 |
+----------+------------------------+---------------+----------+----------+However at some point branching is required, and the bulk rates also add latency.
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
Gemini's summary about the shipping CO2 sections:
Shipping accounts for 80% of all international transport but only 37% of transport's carbon emissions (9:13 - 9:18).
Road transport is highlighted as the "King of pollution," making up less than 10% of international transport but over half of emissions (9:26 - 9:32).
Ferrying pears across the Earth is actually less carbon intensive than driving them in a truck to a packing plant across one's own country (9:48 - 9:52).
All international shipping combined is responsible for only 2.5% of global emissions (9:58 - 10:15).
The question is which is easier to do (ROI)... to cut the shipping fuel carbon footprint by half, or over the road trucking (that's about 1/4th of all the shipping) by 20%? For that matter, moving 25% of the over the road trucking to rail would accomplish that too.
Also I’m passionately opposed to feathering billionaires’ nests, even with fractions of pennies of profit.
This story is funny, but also so so sad.
So people figured out, that you can abuse it to send anything to anyone in the country. Just create a fake listing for 1 PLN, let the receiver "buy" it (there is some extra service fee, but like $1) and there you go - probably the cheapest shipping possible, much cheaper than regular ~$5-7 box machine package.
About this item
- Do
- Not
- Buy
- This
- Product
What on earth is going on here?
I actually used to have(maybe still have?) a LG Xenon
Some (many?) vendors on Amazon will recycle pages this way. Sell some item, change the item and description to dummy values when it stops selling, change to another item that will be sold, repeat.
This is usually done to keep the reviews, though I've also heard about this being used for money laundering.
Domestic overnight mail / express mail was prohibitively expensive, something equivalent to $150 for small items.
However, if I ordered something via USPS International Express, those items would automatically be shipped as overnight / express mail once inside Norway, and handed to the Norwegian postal system. A parcel from New York to where I lived would take 2-3 working days, and as a bonus, USPS Int'l Express only cost around $50 for the same size parcel!
So while not the same type of arbitrage as OP posted about (where items become cheaper due to free shipping), I could save a lot of time and money.
Maybe a more extreme example would be the ultra cheap shipping prices from China. You paid like $1 in shipping, which would have cost $10 if you bought the same service domestically.
IIRC, the root of these practices go back many, many decades. And has a been a thorn on the side of modern shipping ever since Chinese e-commerce exploded.
It’s either "ultra cheap shipping" or "ultra low shipping prices". Prices can't be cheap. /nitpick
If I order something locally, maybe it'll have made it to the departure sorting office in that time.
It's horribly annoying to have a product that is $34.99 and you want it, but it'll cost shipping unless you get the damn Volkswagen screw; and then Amazon ships them individually anyway.
Even sellers started doing this, but instead of selling random items, they sell "extra hardened packaging material" conveniently at $1, $2, $3... prices. Of course when item arrives, no extra material to be seen. When questioned, one of them said "well, the package had cardboard box - that's it, wink wink, please do not report us".
Not only did I do it to get free shipping, I got it to get free international shipping.
For extra bonus CO2 points, the other item was coming from a different country. So I basically paid $0.42 to have a single packet of kool-aid shipped across the pacific ocean.
(I'd never had kool-aid before and I must say I was disappointed.)
I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.
Edit: I'm taking part of this to the root of the thread
E.g. an Amazon van rolls through my street multiple times a day. What is the marginal cost of them stopping at my house and dropping off a potato?
At my house, it's a 140 mile round trip between the fulfillment center ("are you feeling fulfilled yet?") and the drop off location.
OTOH, there's likely more of "you" than there are of "me" ...
While Amazon is efficient, "fractions of a cent" is probably the wrong order of magnitude for even the most efficient order.
At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.
The USPS is a government-run spam delivery service that there is no way to opt out of. Those of us who do banking and other administrative tasks online would be better off if the government shut it down completely, or better yet subsidized it slightly so it doesn't have to deliver spam to survive.
But as it is, I don't see any good reason to have any more respect for USPS than I do for any other spammer.
On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.
[0] E.g. https://www.usglobalmail.com/virtual-mailbox/Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)
I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").
It's the difference in 1990s billionaires and 2020s billionaires. Bill Gates was so rich because he owned a lot of Microsoft shares and received profits from those shares as dividends. Jeff Bezos is so rich because he owns a lot of Amazon shares and people keep being willing to pay more and more for those shares so his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
But that’s exactly the loophole: you can borrow for very cheap against this notional equity without incurring a cent in taxes (since divodends are never paid out)
At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!
If you're curious, https://mappymail.com
Maybe that was just for me (in a large Canadian city at the time) or maybe they don’t do that anymore?
I haven’t considered getting prime since, it would be a lot more interesting if it actually provided the shipping terms they advertise.
And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!
I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.
Now you're part of their education.
Or... they are sophisticated and trying to get a ton of relatively inexpensive positive ratings before selling things that are actually expensive?
I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.
99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.
It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.
$0.25 - Lime - Amazon Fresh -FREE 2-hour delivery on orders over *$100*
Other products have similar shipping restrictions, or the prices are higher than claimed.
Also, most of the cheapest products (at least before tariff effects kicked in) don't allow customized messages that postcards allow, for obvious reasons.
Or 3.5oz filet mignon flavor dog food for $0.84+tax with FREE two day delivery. https://www.amazon.com//dp/B07VBFLCKT
Beat that!
That's right, you're also cementing Amazon's control of the US economy. Both by doing more business there, and by spending time on that site which will lead to you doing even more of your business there. Not to mention having to be an "Amazon Prime" person to begin with.
This may sound weird to some, but - you should really avoid using Amazon where possible.
This is fun, https://walzr.com/weather-watching
That means you would have to do these shenanigans roughly 1/3 of the year without ceasing before you even started to touch Amazon's profit margin for your account alone.
When I try to ship a lemon to a friend I get "There was a problem with some of the items in your order (see below for more information): Sorry, Lemon can't be shipped to the address you selected. Please remove the item or select another address."
Pity, my friend needed a lemon, to know I was thinking of him.
Edit: I can ship a lemon for $3 shipping if I select my friends address prior to adding the lemon to the cart, but with no option for a gift note that I can see.
https://www.digikey.com/en/help-support/delivery-information...
It arrives in a few weeks by Amazon's own carriers, not USPS/UPS/FedEx
Who is paying the $80 DeMinimis fee on the $1 cable I got last week from China?
note the last three sentences, $80, $160, $200 MININMUM
> The duty was initially set at 30% of the value of the postal item, but on April 8, the duty was increased to 90% of the value of the postal item. On April 9, President Trump increased the de minimis duty to 120%.
> Then, on May 12, the president issued an executive order lowering the duty rate for de minimis mail shipments to 54% effective May 14, 2025, at 12:01 a.m. ET.
> The per postal item containing goods duty for low-value postal shipments is $100 as of May 2 (after being increased by executive orders dated April 8 and April 9) This fee increased to $200 on June 1, 2025.
> There are new duty rates for international postal shipments in the executive order that eliminates de minimis for all countries, as described here. The specific duty for postal shipments:
> $80 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate of less than 16%.
> $160 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate between 16% and 25%.
> $200 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate above 25%.
When I add that to my basket and go to checkout, the only available delivery option 'Fast - Tomorrow' costs $2.99.
There is a non-food item in the list, which costs $0.51+tax, i.e. $0.54 including free shipping.
It is better, actually, you can even scan a real hand written post card.
I'd estimate I've put in $200 at most, and probably put 15-20k pages through it. Still prints just fine. It doesn't have color, or networking features, but I can share it on the network from the connected computer. I'm not sure they make anything this reliable these days, but I bet there's quite a few old laser printers floating around still.
My color laser printer has definitely been cheaper than me driving to the store hundreds of times to print thousands of color prints.
A couple of these are still valid with Prime, but most of them are Amazon Fresh items ($9.95 service fee for orders under $50), or out of stock, or the price is now way more.
Tempted to vibecode a little tool to manage ride requests..
Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
Plenty of people ship to the office. I buy stuff for my parents from time to time. When I'm on vacation, I might ship to the hotel or a friend I'm visiting or ...
No, I've had stuff shipped to plenty of addresses.
No and that would be crazy. I'm not aware of any e-commerce site that has a restriction like that.
> Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
Well, it's probably one fraud signal among many, but it's absolutely not generally prohibited. I've sent things from Amazon to other people (or to myself while staying in a hotel), and other people have sent things to me, many times.
Prime seems to only offer free shipping if it’s over $25?
Of course, it didn't work. There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the arbitrage scheme, but the profit per coupon was way too low to make it feasible as a business. Ponzi pivoted to paying off older investments with new investments, and the rest is history.
While screwing over amazon is noble enough, the end result of people doing this would only result in higher fees for prime and fewer items being eligible for "free" shipping. At the same time, you'd be depriving a very valuable public service of the few cents they ask to offset the cost of message delivery to anywhere in the nation. I'm sure they'd be happy to deliver something besides spam too.
Try giving the USPS $139 per year and see what you can send with them.
So. Many. Possibilities.
This appears to be the cost without subsidy, with the mail service now run by a private company.
It's fine. I receive less than the average 10 letters per year (including junk mail). I check the mail box every two weeks or so.
That just means that whatever it actually costs to deliver mail to/from whatever parts of Denmark they provide service for, the people who use the service will pay that cost plus an additional cost on top of it so that the private owner (and perhaps their shareholders) can line their pockets. The nice thing about public services is that you avoid paying that extra money just so that a small number of people can personally profit from it. You can also lose a lot of transparency and control over how the service is run.
That said, I'm a bit envious of the lack of junk mail.
Simply switch the destination address on the envelope with the sender address, and drop it in the mailbox.
When then post office returns the letter to sender because of insufficient postage it will have delivered the letter for you.