The amazing observation in your example, for me, is that it's one of the few things you can get cheaply, fast, and reliably. The holy trifecta of impossible requirements.

Some 60-70 years ago, you could not get it done for any sum of money. Maybe the military could do it, on a good day. A few years later, it's not just possible, but cheap.

I did not know that about Japan, but apparently here, as with the fax machine, Japan is an exception. Japan may spend $500m on telegrams (which incidentally, doesn't seem like very many telegrams per person per year - if each is cheaper than I was quoted by quite a bit, say $50 total, and there's 127m people, then that's one a month on average. I'm also not sure they spend that much since I can't find any quick hits in Google discussing it recently; perhaps you could blog about it sometime.), but nevertheless what delivery services in Japan do or people do in Japan is not that useful, in terms of amortizing fixed costs and realizing economies of scale, to American or Australian delivery costs, nor is it informative about how often Americans or Australians send telegrams.

I also didn't bother to check Fedex/DHL because I figured while they probably did have faster deliveries than USPS, they always charge way more and we were unsure we really needed within a day delivery (which is the only place on the Pareto frontier the private companies would be for general document delivery).

As it happened, we were unsatisfied with our options so we kept digging and eventually came up with what we think are the phone number & email address of the person we need to reach, so hopefully it all turned out to be moot.