A while back we wrote about the innovative idea that to combat crime and money laundering Sweden was thinking about going cashless as a way to deal with crime and the hoarding of large amounts of wonga by, well, bank robbery. Now it’s thinking about supplementing postage stamps with an electronic addition – a text message.
According to English-language reports, the kingdom is evaluating how quickly it could replace stamps with an SMS-based payment system. How would that work? Well, you’d send a text to the country’s equivalent of the Post Office and get a code back. You’d then write this on your next bit of postage and that would be accepted as payment in lieu – up to a weight, apparently, of 2kg.
We do immediately have to add that this is a catch-up with a similar, and probably more advanced, system set for launch in Denmark at the end of the month. (There’s a funny Northern joke that when something is good out of that part of the world it comes from Sweden, when not so good – from Scandinavia.) In any case, Sweden’s wouldn’t debut before the summer, a spokesperson is quoted as saying.
The post authorities in both countries say they aren’t worried that people will continue to send letters, despite the rise in other forms of communication, and that paying postage by mobile phone is seen as a way of making the process easier. It also pooh-poohs fraud as an issue, as the risk of forging codes is held to be no greater than it is with traditional stamps, as both must eventually be read by postal service scanners.
Is snailmail dying? A few years ago – in Internet years, about 150 of ’em (it was 1998) – I went on the BBC to be mean against a system to send e-versions of conventional telegrams (remember them? A lost art form of communication if ever there was).
But as email in particular gets more clogged up with rubbish spam and what have you, the appeal of what we have deluded ourselves as being fast, free, secure and paperless is getting a bit tarnished.
So could we see a return, or at least stay of execution, for written communication? I doubt to be honest if there’d be a personal comms revival – no more billets doux, I’m afraid – but a business one, probably a good idea.
Cost, however, is an issue with real-world (bits) based communications over electronic (bytes), though. It now costs 41p to send a first class piece of mail – whatever that means in this day and age of once a day delivery, while it costs 44 cents for the equivalent in the US.
The Swedes say the text message system they want to use won’t affect pricing, but I think that’s the wrong message – why not cut the cost and make this SMS-based approach the cheaper one?
This story reminds us that we must find out where the Swedes are with the removal of cash – we’ll look for an update on that in the next few days.
