The price others pay for our next-day deliveries

When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster that I’d seen advertised in a comic. It depicted Superman, whom I held in high regard, scragging a distinctly second-tier villain called Nick O’Teen; the relic of some lame early-eighties anti-smoking campaign. For reasons I can’t now fathom, I burned to have this on my bedroom wall. I remember it now not because of the poster, but because the wait for it to arrive. ‘Allow eight weeks for delivery’, it said. And it really did take eight weeks to show up – which, when you’re nine and you really, really want a Superman poster, might as well be a lifetime. 

The very idea of waiting that long for anything, now, will be incomprehensible to a nine-year-old. It’s incomprehensible to an adult. Even next-day delivery is starting to seem a bit sluggish. Online shopping listings, these days, often promise same-day delivery if you get your order in in the morning. And this lightning fulfilment, this near-as-dammit introduction of teleportation to the online consumer economy, what’s more, comes, or seem to come, nearly for free.