RURAL SERVICES

Our local post office closed on 31 August. In fact, it closed some years ago. But Post Danmark did a deal with the local Shell petrol station, whereby you could pick up parcels throughout the day and send letters etc from 2 to 5 in the afternoon. The woman who runs Shell told me that it involved a lot of administration for almost no money. So she stopped doing it at the end of last week, and nobody has yet volunteered to take it over.

Which means that I must now fetch my packages for the cinema from the supermarket in the next town, some 10 km away. As I discovered this morning, driving 20 km just to pick up a parcel is a real pain. The easiest thing would be for Post Danmark to deliver the cinema packages to my house, and leave them in the barn if I am not home. They do that for private things, but apparently have a rule that they can't do that for commercial deliveries. Why? I don't know.

Post Danmark is supposedly the most efficient postal operator in Europe. If they can't make rural deliveries work, then nobody can.

Walter Blotscher