The amount of people doing their shopping online has increased dramatically in recent years. Not only are we looking to the internet to buy large and bulky items, we are also using it to buy smaller items as well as groceries. Let’s face it it’s just so easy to do, everything is made as straightforward as possible during the buying process, we can buy cutlery online and have it delivered to our door without the need to collect and carry anything heavy home ourselves. The internet is making us lazy, we are no longer happy to spend our Saturday mornings in town browsing in all of the stores there, we are now more content to sit at home of an evening and browse online.
Lazy Shopping
Our shopping habits are becoming lazy and what this is doing is putting many high street retailers out of business. Yes they can still sell their products online, but they are losing the much needed foot traffic through their front doors. Over the counter sales are falling and for many businesses, especially the smaller ones, this means that they are not taking in as much income as they need to leaving them unable to meet their overheads and meaning the store is simply no longer viable. People are not only losing their jobs, many are also losing their livelihoods as a result of us being more content to shop from the comfort of our sofa, than we are to make the trip into town anymore. This is just another example of how as a species we are becoming more sedentary, and lazy in the way that we live.
What We Can Do
One of the things that we can do is start using out local stores again. We can head to the high street to do our clothes shopping and get back into the habit of trying things on before we by them, rather than sending things back that we have had delivered to our home because they do not fit. We can buy our groceries at our local store and give them our trade, we can touch and feel the fruits and vegetables and pick what we buy for ourselves rather than having a nameless supermarket employee do it for us when we shop online. We can get back involved with the businesses in our community and show them that we do support them.