Three cheers for armchair shopping
THE merry clink of the milkman’s bottles has returned, the new ruling now in force being that whatever can be bought on line will be bought online. Milk included.
Not that I am ever conscious to enjoy the nostalgic sound of Ernie’s gold tops a-rattling in their crate: the delivery occurs somewhere around 2am, a fact which merely increases my admiration for people who are prepared to work the most ungodly hours in order to make a living.
Successive lockdowns have brought home many of the benefits of online shopping.
No more jostling through supermarket aisles with the attendant risk of picking up a virus; no more asking for an item in a hardware shop to be met with a sharp intake of breath, a shake of the head and the explanation that it’s currently not in stock but there could be a delivery next Wednesday but even that’s not guaranteed because they’ve been all over the place with those lately.
And no more driving 45 miles to the nearest decent department store to be disappointed by the limited range of goods on offer and then to be advised by an assistant that if I visited the website the whole gamut would be available for inspection and, of course, purchase. And, above all, no more interminable queueing in a bank waiting to make a minor transaction.
Online living is great as long as you don’t own a village shop, in which case the endless convoy of delivery vans past the door might rankle somewhat, though not quite as much as the appearance of a shame-faced, ex-regular customer seeking to buy the one item they discovered, when their order was unpacked, they had left off their list.
It all makes eminent sense, and even more so since fuel prices started heading for the ceiling.
The modest charge asked for doorstep grocery deliveries is a fraction of what one would spend on a timeconsuming and polluting car journey. Fewer vehicles on the road mean fewer emissions and a bonus for the planet.
But we are undeniably fortunate. We know our way around laptops and tablets. We possess the necessary skills and the necessary highspeed broadband to make online ordering a simple, routine matter. It would be brilliant if everyone in rural areas were similarly placed.
But a recent survey by the Countryside Alliance (CA) revealed what a huge discrepancy still exists between town and country when it comes to communications technology. Currently 85 per cent of rural businesses report their internet speeds as being either ‘poor but manageable’ (47 per cent), or ‘unmanageably poor’ (38 per cent). And it is entirely safe to assume that the picture is the same within rural homes.
Help is on the way. There’s the £5 billion Project Gigabit which aims to support the rollout of gigabit capable broadband in hard-to-reach areas across the whole of the UK.
And the £500 million investment in the Shared Rural Network, which seeks to deliver high-quality 4G mobile coverage to 95 per cent of the UK, so offering extra coverage to 280,000 premises especially in rural areas.
But this is desperate fire-fighting by a Government which has failed to appreciate the supersonic speed of developments in online activity and invest in the necessary infrastructure soon enough.
What programmed improvements have been announced, particularly in the South West, have been plagued by delays, unforeseen problems and generally pitifully managed so that rural digital communications are still a long, long way from where they should be.
The CA report is quite clear: bringing them up to scratch will deliver benefits not merely for individual businesses but for the wider rural economy, making it, for instance, less dependent on seasonal business.
The other side of the coin it highlights, however, is the fact that some 12.6 million British adults lack basic digital skills while 5.6 million have never used the internet at all.
A goodly number of them will be living in rural areas but it’s a chicken and egg situation: until superfast communications and all the advantages they convey are available everywhere, why go to the trouble of learning how to use them?