As the first month of 2026 comes to an end, we’re adding one more entry to our Future Bucket List: the end of the Post Office.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Cars replaced horses and buggies. Digital music replaced CDs which had replaced records. Email replaced letters.
A graph of first-class cards and letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service pretty much tells the story:
Over the past decade, the line is surprisingly straight, showing a decline of over a billion letters each year since 2016. At this rate, the USPS would deliver not a single letter ten years from now.
A very similar decline befell the Danish postal service, PostNord, which saw a 90% decrease in letters delivered since 2000. After over 400 years, that service delivered its last letter and removed its remaining mailboxes on December 30, 2025.
The USPS lost $9 billion last year, and well over $100 billion since 2007. Any remaining letter delivery could be replaced by a private carrier, as they have done in Denmark. Hmm.
Our Future Bucket List is “Technologies that we wonder if we’ll see in our lifetime.” In this case, however, it’s a technology we wonder if we’ll no longer see.