Editor: I know that fashions continually tend to go back in time, but is this also going to happen with the way that we do our shopping?

When I was a youngster, my mother used to write out a list of her monthly requirements, and I would then climb on my bicycle and peddle up to our local grocery store, which was a tiny shop a few blocks away on the corner. The shop itself comprised a counter with groceries stacked up on shelves behind the counter, with not a single price shown anywhere. The grocer would then prepare the groceries that my mother wanted, and his young assistant would bring our groceries to us on his bicycle. A few days later I would peddle up to the shop and pay for the goods.

Then, with the advent of the age when almost every family owned a motor car, some chap in America came up with the bright idea of 鈥渁llowing鈥� us to do our own shopping by arranging all of his goods on a series of accessible shelves with the cost of each item clearly displayed. Now the grocer, after stacking his shelves, could handle far more customers in a day than he was ever able to do before.

Now, many years later, we are starting to go back in time: the customer now sends a list to the store, and an assistant then does all the work that the 鈥渙ld time鈥� grocer had to do and the only difference now is that the customer is required to come and fetch his supplies instead of having them delivered to his home.

Somehow this does not make sense to me, and I cannot believe that the store owner is benefiting financially from this new arrangement, so I believe that, in order to compensate for his additional expenses, the store owner is going to increase the cost of the items he is selling, and guess who is going to lose out? Certainly not the 鈥渟o called鈥� online shopper.

Unfortunately each store owner now feels obliged to provide the same services as his competitor, and as a result money is being wasted to cater for the few.

Brian King, 91原创 Township