As regular life resumes in fits and starts, Royal Mail is feeling the squeeze. This is partly because everybody’s squeezed, but partly because deliveries are down , and from this it would seem that the new normal is steadily returning to the old normal. If you have observed the younger generation over the past two years, you’d think times had changed for ever. Teenagers and twentysomethings see a five-day delivery estimate as a breach of their human rights. I’ve seen a look of mild bafflement cross my kids’ faces when they order something on Amazon and it doesn’t arrive immediately, as if they were dealing not with a complex delivery chain but a magic lamp.
For the rest of us, those pandemic years during which there was an actual cardboard shortage because we were sending and receiving so many parcels were more mixed. Did our online shopping habits bring us closer to our neighbours? Maybe for a while, as we took in each other’s parcels and made like characters in a Richard Scarry book, but there was always the question: “When will this go too far? When will next-door have had an absolute bar of my repeat dishwasher tablet order? When will the smiling fade?” There was something unsettling about the galloping consumption, typified not by Royal Mail, but by Amazon. Midway through the pandemic, I ordered a fishing net from there which came in a box the size of a coffin. It begged the question, if you ordered a coffin, what size box would that come in? Would it be as big as your house? Resituating my shopping back to the actual shops was quite soothing, as it protected me from the realities of its waste and needlessness, which was a bit of a, ahem, paradox.
