The mailman and the milkman
The mailman and the milkman
Muse #540 - coming around a full circle in life
Once upon a time, long long ago, we had several traders visit us most weekdays. This included the mailman who faithfully delivered mail. The milkman, in fact, milkmen because there were several who brought milk each day. Then the oil man - a guy with a cart selling a variety of rancid-smelling cooking oil. The vegetable cart guy. The fruit seller. And the dry cleaner - or should I call him iron-man. The guy who did the ironing of the clothes with his huge and heavy coal-burning iron box. These were everyday visitors.
Then came the shops and the supermarkets. Selling all these in a single location. And slowly one by one the home delivery and sales carts disappeared unable to compete with the scale of the larger shops and chains. Efficiencies and scale were winning over niche players.
And then again, everything runs in cycles. While postal mail has reduced, the delivery system has come back with a vengeance. Everything is being delivered. All sorts of goods and services come to the door. Any time you want. Even our dog knows about the deliveries and can sniff out the food and treats that get delivered. And though sometimes we can order the dog treats one at a time from Amazon and still get delivered, we ordered larger quantities to save the planet and reduce the number of deliveries each week.
The next hop in this cycle is that if delivery brings home more and more stuff, the shops and the supermarkets are going to slim down in the name of efficiencies, exactly the same reasons of efficiency and optimization for which they were built over the last few decades. Such is life. What goes around comes around in a different form.