"Peter Masson" wrote:
"Roland Perry" wrote

In London in the 40's you could post a letter in the morning informing
someone you'd be round for afternoon tea. By the 70's you could still
post a letter at 9pm in a town in the Southeast and expect it to be
delivered to someone in another town by 8am.

In 1970 I could post a letter at the main post office in Oxford up to
midnight and it would be delivered in South East London at breakfast time.

And now you can send an email, text, tweet, IM, DM, usenet post, etc,
usually for little or no charge, and have it delivered anywhere in the
world in seconds. With that sort of competition, no-one's going to pay for
the huge network of people, sorting offices and vans that would be needed
to maintain the old style of physical mail services, that delivered locally
in hours, from a previous era.

Just be grateful that we still have deliveries to everyone's front door,
six days a week, across the whole country, at a standard price. In years to
come, we'll look back in amazement at that level of service. Most other
countries no longer offer it.