Comment by Symbiote 16 hours ago
In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible.
In your country,
- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?
- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
In some countries, it is somewhat of a question "why" though. For example, banks in Sweden stopped carrying cash, and AFAIK (at least when I lived there) you interact with them either online or via the telephone, even cards are sent your home address instead of being picked up the branch and so on.
Contrast to where I live now (Spain) where I can still go to the bank to deposit/withdraw money, so the use case for the branch/building/office is kind of obvious.
Yes, there are few reasons to go to a Swedish bank branch, and they've been closing branches, too. Almost everything is done online - really goes for most things in Sweden, not just banks.
You don't even visit a branch to become a customer as long as you have an account with some other bank, which gives you BankID, a digital ID/signature system that's ubiquitous in Sweden. I have accounts with three Swedish banks. Of those, one doesn't have physical locations to visit, and a second I never visited. It's surely been ten years since I went to the third, my main bank, in person, and the branch office I went to closed years ago. Looking it up, my main bank only has one office left in the city, it's only open for three hours a day and requires a prior appointment for any services.
Cash is only handled by a few bank branches (not all banks) and even then by prior booking - cash has been pretty much gone from society for a while now. Your card gets sent to you by postal mail. If you need to talk to someone at the bank, they'll suggest telephone or video calls, and will only see you in person as a last resort. Safe deposit boxes have also been largely discontinued as a service.
There are multiple ways to receive letters. Having a mailman delivering it directly to your house is usually the rich area's way to handle it. The lower version of this is to let people check with the post office themselves. If it's fancy, you have at least your personal postbox there, or you will have to ask office-workers which then depends on their working time. And outside of this, there are other ways to use other locations and people, not directly affiliated with the postal service for delivering letters. Pubs and other shops are often such locations, or in really poor areas the village chief will receive them, and then handle distribution.
But it should be noted, except the physical objects, those letters can be also replaced with other means of communication. Just calling people via phone is common, or nowadays sending an email will also do the job. In my country we have a working and reliable postal system, but companies are still replacing letters with digital communication as far as laws allow it. Payments are also running automatically, so the bills are more informative and for taxes.
> - how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?
The bank sends it through mail but they warn you that if it doesn't arrive within 2 weeks you should go in person to the bank to retrieve it. Depending on where you live there's a 50/50 chance that it never arrives through mail so you just wait 2 weeks and go to the bank.
> - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
Email. Or the news channel for elderly people (if the increase is too big). If the increase is small that's a fact of life, everyone just expects it to increase a bit every 2 or 3 months.
> - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
Website or bank app. There are physical places that take cash payments and do the online process for you, elderly people generally use those.
I'm from a similar country and would never have thought about using snail mail for anything you've mentioned.
For bank cards you go to their branch and get a new one from a person who works there, or by interacting with a terminal which prints your name on a blank card and spits it out. Some banks deliver them to your home address by courier service and hand them over in person, and they're not "elite" or special by any means.
Utilities are paid through online/mobile banking, there are many alternatives and it takes maybe 10 seconds. Even my 70-something year old relatives use them. Some even older ones rely on help from others, or to go physical bank branches and pay there (which wastes a lot of time of everyone waiting in line to be serviced — I don't personally know anyone who does that, but have seen it a couple of times).
Price increases? Local news, or you can subscribe to receive them by email. Or just check in the online banking app when it's time to make another payment, it's all there.
Am Estonian, and from your list only the first one is with physical mail, though more and more people use virtual cards / Apple Pay instead of even owning a physical card. We can also withdraw cash from an ATM using Apple Pay, no need for a card.
As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).
Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.
I'm in the UK where we do have a generally very reliable postal service, but of those three, it's only the bank card that involves a physical letter for me - and even then I have no idea where my bank cards even are because I just use contactless via my phone/watch nowadays.
My electricity payment is direct debit - though I can pay manually via the app if I wish. The app has the amount on it, and they notify of service changes via the app and email. I suppose that if I ignored the electronic notifications they'd eventually send me a letter.
Even if you do get your statements by post, basically nobody here would pay for it by mail. If you really hate computers, you can pay over the phone, or set up a direct debit by phone/letter, or use a "PayPoint" - which includes most corner shops, supermarkets and post offices. It's also quite common for elderly people to just have one of their younger relatives manage it all for them.
Danish Post will soon terminate general mail delivery due to low need.
https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m...
To our questions from Germany:
- by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra.
- on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though.
- In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )
You physically go to the bank.
The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed.
My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city.
You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though).
(this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)