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.
The whole move to online shopping reminded me of the move from cash to credit cards. It was a simple enough switch, but would it change our attitudes in a more profound way? Would we lose our bearings and just spend indiscriminately? Or would the joy seep out of the process, so that we stopped buying stuff and, sooner or later, stopped wanting it? Neither, it turned out; we just adapted to a new reality, just as we adapted to the reality of carrying the sum of human knowledge in a phone.
Back when we assumed that deliveries were the new normal, the mirroring prediction was that high streets would decline. It had implications for capital, playing out now in the confected new culture war of “back to the office or not?”, which is a proxy for “protect commercial landlords or not?” But it also raised questions about what on earth would happen to our high streets if we could not shop in them. Would defunct department stores become a hub for civic activism or, more likely, table football? Or would they just inevitably wither into dereliction until someone turned them into flats? Early signs from where I live are that everything that previously went bust is now a bar.
The real mistake in all post-Covid predictions was to assume that because the changes were vast and sudden in 2020, then the change back would be similarly abrupt. Because we all moved instantly to shopping online, we would stay like that for ever, or move back en masse. All that acclimatisation to pandemic life, away from large groups of people and towards smaller ones, away from the office, towards the home office with the set-dressed Zoom background, away from the conference and the meeting towards the screen, it would all either be maintained as a seismic change, or it would reverse dramatically. That was the only way to give meaning to what was happening; that at least it might teach us something about how we’d prefer to live.
In fact, the thing we like the least is sudden, major change. My young ’uns are still averaging about three parcels a week I’d say. All nonsense, like a single gel pen or a tiny jewellery hook. We inch back to normality via a series of minute decisions about how much cardboard we’d ideally like to dispose of, and how many neighbours we might bother to retrieve our parcels each week. If – for many of us – the answer is none, a painful home truth for Royal Mail will at least unfurl slowly.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
