When I first moved to London in the mid 1970s all stores shut at 6pm, except for Thursday when there was ‘late night shopping’ and they remained open until 8pm.

When I first moved to London in the mid 1970s all stores shut at 6pm, except for Thursday when there was ‘late night shopping’ and they remained open until 8pm.

You had to get out of bed early on a Saturday morning to get to John Lewis in Oxford Street before it closed at 1pm.

All the shops were shut on Sunday.

There was some distance selling through catalogues, but they were typically catering for the lower-end of the market for people who needed more time to pay and did not necessarily have access to credit cards.

If you had described then what is possible today with the internet, people would have thought you were mad.

Today, you can buy virtually anything you like at any time from anywhere, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In fact, if the item you want to purchase is not available on the internet, particularly from the brand’s own site, you are really quite surprised.

Two weeks ago I was shopping on a Sunday in the Musto store in Padstow. I found a jacket that I really liked but they didn’t have my size so the store assistant gave me the item reference number and the website address.

Later that evening, I went onto the site and found not only the jacket I was looking for but a jumper that wasn’t available in the store. As a result, Musto now has £250 of my money that in the old world it would never have seen because I couldn’t be bothered to traipse round London to find a stockist that had these items.

Of course, behaviour will continue to change, not least because there are still areas where the shopping service to the consumer could be improved.

In the fashion world, department stores have for a long time helped the consumer by offering a wide choice of brands under one roof.

That not only makes it easier to mix and match your outfit, but when you are given a set of saucepans for Christmas you can return them for a beautiful Prada handbag.

Sadly, this doesn’t quite happen to the same extent in the grocery world. In my family’s case, we use Sainsbury’s for the main shop with top-ups during the week from Waitrose and Marks & Spencer for certain items, including fresh meats and Percy Pigs.

At the moment, to have these delivered to your home would result in a series of separate visits by each retailer.

Surely there is a great opportunity here for someone - Ocado? - to provide this service across all of the supermarkets.

Maybe it will never happen because each grocer wants to ‘own’ the customer, but it would actually be a tremendous help to those same consumers, enabling them to change their behaviour.

  • Peter Williams is a non-executive director of Asos and a former chief executive of Selfridges