The Danish Postal Service That Was

The Danish postal service began in 1624, and the post horn logo and the red and yellow postboxes are part of the Danish experience.

An exhibition at the Design Museum in Copenhagen highlights the changes to the typeface and layout of the current design to reflect the changing demands on the postal service. The photo above is from that exhibition.

And if you are a tourist and you visited the museum, you might never learn that a year ago the postal service abandoned stamps and post offices.

To send a letter now you have to find a DAO shop or go online to dao.as and get a code. Put that code on your envelope and either ask DAO (for an extra fee) to collect the letter from you, or go to a DAO shop and post your letter.

Dao is the abbreviation for Dansk Avis Omdeling A/S (Danish Newspaper Distribution) and the .as top-level country code domain belongs to American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the South Pacific.

The service chose .as because in Denmark a public limited company is called an Aktiese/skab, which is abbreviated as A/S. And from there to .as is a small hop, but perhaps not a wise one if the United States and Denmark ever fell out over their arrangement for security in Greenland.

51% of Dao is owned by JP Politikens Hus, 32% by JFM, and 17% Berlingske Media, which are three Danish media groups that between them publish national and regional newspapers and financial websites.

Looked at from the UK experience, the idea of private enterprises owning the postal service should not seem so strange. After all, Royal Mail is owned by EP Group, controlled by through its parent company, International Distribution Services (IDS).

One difference is that EP Group ia controlled by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, rather than by homegrown owners as in the Danish arrangement.

Here is the letter I sent from Copenhagen to our home address in London, using the code I obtained from the online service. Look at the return address in the event that the letter is undeliverable. It reads

If undeliverable, please return to KD 22049367, P.O. Box 2450 5000 Salzburg. Austria

So this little letter sent from Copenhagen to an address in London, using the code (rather than a stamp) obtained from the Dao.as online service, left Denmark and arrived in the UK via Austria.

How strange.