In many countries people now do most of their shopping online rather than in physical shops.

In recent years, a lot of people prefer to buy things on the internet instead of going to real shops. In my opinion, this is mostly a positive development, but it also creates some problems.

Firstly, online shopping is very convenient. People can buy products at any time, even at night, and they do not need to travel to the city centre or wait in a queue. This is very useful for busy people, for parents with small children and for old people who cannot walk a long distance.

Secondly, the prices on the internet are usually lower. There are many websites selling the same product, so the customer can compare and choose the cheapest one. Also, internet shops do not pay for a big building in the centre of the city, so they can sell cheaper than normal shops.

However, there are also negative effects. Many traditional shops are closing because they cannot compete, and their workers lose their jobs. In addition, some people, especially elderly people, feel lonely because going to the shop was a chance to meet other people and to talk with them.

In conclusion, although online shopping causes some problems for small shops, I believe it is a positive development because it saves time and money for millions of customers.

Retail has shifted decisively online in many countries, with a growing share of purchases made from home rather than in shops. On balance I regard this as a positive development, though the costs it imposes are real and fall on particular groups rather than being spread evenly.

The clearest benefit is access. Physical retail has always worked well for people who live in cities, have transport and can shop during working hours, and rather badly for everyone else. Online shopping removes those conditions: someone in a small town now has the same range available as someone in the capital, and a person with limited mobility can buy without a journey that might previously have taken half a day. Lower prices reinforce this, since online sellers avoid the overheads of a city-centre lease and competition between them is far more visible to the customer.

The costs, however, are more serious than the usual complaint about shop closures suggests. A high street is not only a set of businesses; it is where a certain amount of local employment, social contact and passing trade happens at once. When footfall falls, the loss is not confined to the shops that close — cafés, small services and market stalls that depended on people already being there go with them, and the effect on an elderly customer for whom the shop was a daily conversation is not captured by any price comparison.

In conclusion, I believe the shift is positive because it has widened access far more than it has narrowed it, but the losses are concentrated in places and among people least able to absorb them, and that deserves a policy response rather than dismissal.

The move of retail from the high street to the screen is among the fastest changes in ordinary economic life of the past two decades. I regard it as a net positive, and I think the honest case for that verdict has to begin by acknowledging that the losses are not imaginary — they are simply narrower, and differently distributed, than the people defending the high street usually claim.

The strongest argument in its favour is not convenience but access, and the distinction matters. Physical retail quietly rationed choice by geography: what you could buy depended on what a local owner judged worth stocking for a small captive market, which meant rural customers paid more for less and anyone with limited mobility paid in time and difficulty. Online selling dissolves that constraint almost entirely. The person who has gained most is not the busy professional saving twenty minutes, but the customer for whom the previous system barely worked at all — and that is a considerably better reason to welcome a change than saving a queue.

The objection deserves to be put at its strongest, though, and it is usually put too weakly. The problem is not that shops close; businesses have always closed. It is that a high street performs functions incidental to selling — it concentrates people in one place, which sustains cafés, small services and casual employment that exist only because footfall exists, and it supplies routine social contact to people who have little other source of it. Take away the retail anchor and this whole agglomeration unwinds, which is why a town's decline looks so disproportionate to the number of shops actually lost.

What this tells us, however, is that the loss is a loss of function rather than of shopping, and functions can be housed differently. Reversing the trend is neither possible nor desirable; what is possible is refusing to let town centres be defined solely by retail — which is a question of what those spaces are allowed to become, not of whether people should be made to shop in them.

My verdict, then, is that this is a positive development whose costs are unusually concentrated. That combination — broad diffuse gains, narrow acute losses — is exactly the pattern that produces genuine hardship alongside genuine progress, and treating it as an argument against the change mistakes a distribution problem for a direction problem.