A man from John Lewis came yesterday to measure up for some window blinds. When he started struggling with the mobile broadband on his phone – which he required to be able to give a quote – I made what I thought was a straightforward offer for him to sign onto my home broadband. He almost went white with fear. He had been told never to do that, he said, for fear of the company ending up as Marks & Spencer has this week – victim of a cyber attack which has put its online sales out of action and prevented it taking contactless payments in its stores, as well as wiping millions off the value of its shares.
Putting absolutely everything online may just be more trouble than it is worth
Gradually it is dawning on even the most uncritical of fans of new technology that putting absolutely everything online may just be more trouble than it is worth. When even your fridge is asking you to hook it up to the internet you have to ask: what is the point? Smart fridges are sold to us on the basis that the appliances might, in the future, be able to order more orange juice automatically when we are running low. But then again, we might not necessarily want every item in our fridge to be restocked. What about that banoffee pie you took a fancy to last week, but which turned out to taste foul: do you really want your fridge deciding that you would like some more, despite you having consigned the remnants of the previous pudding to the bin? An unwanted pie arriving in your next supermarket order is, however, a minor inconvenience compared laying yourself open to a cyber attack which starts with your fridge being compromised and ends up with your bank account being hacked.
The onward march of connected devices has been pushed on us without any great enthusiasm from the masses. It is the same with our gizmo-stuffed cars. Everyone I speak to seems to abhor the loss of proper switches on car dashboards, and their replacement with laptop-like screens. But then how many people do I know who buy their cars brand new? The design of cars is set by the buyers of new vehicles, and also by the opinions of motoring journalists who are never going to buy the cars themselves. Yet it is the rest of us – the habitual second-hand car-buyers – who have to put up with the surfeit of often malfunctioning technology for the greater part of the vehicle’s life.
As for the lobby which wants to abolish cash, the folly of their campaign (which, funny enough, is led by payments companies which have a somewhat obvious vested interest) should now be clear if it is not already. If you are relying on your mobile phone or a contactless card in M&S this week, you may have had to go without your new boxer shorts. But then there are many pockets of the country where every day is like that, thanks to Britain’s appalling mobile broadband coverage. I found better coverage in the uninhabited interior of Iceland than in the middle of some English towns. We have a government which wants to force us to do everything online but fails to provide the infrastructure to do it.
None of this is to say, of course, that online shopping is not often the most convenient way to buy stuff. I wouldn’t want to go back to the days when the only way to buy a kettle was to drive into town and visit a physical shop. But then neither do I fancy a future where online is the only way to do things. The case for a happy middle ground where we can both shop online and with cash in a physical store has never been stronger than it has been this week.
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