As I picked up our New Year’s Day order from the butchers this morning, I was reminded of how little I have used my local butchers and other local stores since I started working in an office.

When I worked from home, I shopped locally every week. Very rarely did we have to do our grocery shopping online. I was able to pick up most things from local stores during my lunch break. It was a good time to get away from my desk and get some air. Now that I commute to an office though, I don’t have the time in the day to continue to shop locally, and the stores where I work aren’t convenient too within my lunch break.

My thoughts on this are still a bit incoherent despite having tried to write this for close to an hour now, but here’s what I have in raw form.

1. More people should be allowed to work remotely. Working from home gives you more time to run a few errands as well as shop locally and support local businesses.
2. More people should be allowed to work fewer hours. Is a 40 hour work week really necessary anymore? Working fewer hours would allow us the time shop locally as opposed to just feeding more and more orders into the Internet retail giants.

I’m not an economist, and I’m sure there are holes in these thoughts, but if I could have seen the damage that internet shopping has caused to my local town, then I would have been a bit more selective about my spending habits over the years.

I’m usually the first person to defend the march of technology, but it’s come to a point where even I’m not sure that the change has been for good.