Traditional methods of sending holiday greetings could be making a comeback, as the Swiss post set a package delivery record in 2012 while the country’s largest telecom provider said users sent 10 per cent fewer text messages at Christmas.
The Swiss post handled 16 million packages in the time period between December 1 and 24, compared with around 15 million in the past few years.
About one million packages came through postal sorting centres in the cantons of Vaud, Thurgau and Solothurn every day during the week leading up to Christmas, twice as many as on a normal workday.
The volume of letters sent across Switzerland also doubled compared to normal, with around 20 million sent per day during the height of the holiday season.
On the other hand, Swisscom, the country’s leading telecommunications provider, reported that on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Swiss people sent around three million fewer text and picture messages than last year via their mobile phones. In 2012, 24.4 million messages were sent over the Christmas holiday.
However, other technologies are likely more responsible for the decline in mobile greetings than this year’s popularity of the Post. Swisscom spokesperson Sepp Huber attributed the downturn in text messages to an increased use of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook as well as smartphone messaging applications such as Whatsapp, Ping and iMessage.