Do we still need our mail system anymore?

As the deal that royal mail faces having 30% of the company being sold off and privatised looking set to go through, we have to wonder if the mail room services are needed anymore.

Is the written letter on its way out? The reduced cost and hassle and increase in speed has certainly seen us send out considerably less ’snail mail’. Email has certainly effected us positivley, with its spell check feature and the huge distances it can cover. Defenders of the art of writing a letter claims it can be more personal to the lover and more formal to the business than a email, but hasnt email evolved to that point now?

Theres still the need for some direct mail services. Bills are still sent out via the post, but how long before the whole country is online, and receiving their bills via the internet? Packages can still be delivered via the mail, but some items such as dvds and cds are now being downloaded and burned from our computers. Even the bigger items are being arranged to be picked up from the computer now.

So why do we still love having a tangible product and mail we can hold and pop down to the postbox? We can appreciate the effort spent on a birthday, christmas and valentines day card and put them aside to view again in years to come. Some people refuse to be dragged into the technological age, technophobes and the elderly still like to receive and send their post, or have troubles adapting to computers are going to use conventional mail services because they need to. Some items to small for courier will still have to be sent via a postal service.

When we are in danger of privatisation of our public mail system, we have to ask what is to come for the conventional methods of mail.