But, for a busy shopping day, and close to closing time, there were few people about with more than one bag of new goodies – and many didn't appear even to have made the one purchase. What did this mean?

That we shuffle around strictly as a window-shopping exercise, unable to detach ourselves completely from the retail experience, even though we're now crunched and squeezed by the economic slump? Or was something else going on?

The fact is that while high street sales in all but the discount chains are depressed, internet shopping is in the rudest of health, with a 52.5 per cent rise in year-on-year sales up to the end of 2007. The 2008 rate of increase is expected to have been even greater.

More than 11 million of us shop online at least twice a week, and 1.3 million Britons log on every day to buy goods and services. Around 90 per cent of Britons shop online at least once a month, compared to only 70 per cent of Americans.

A survey of more than 3,000 people by leading price comparison site Shopzilla.co.uk shows that we're enthusiastically keeping up our shopping habit from the comfort of home, and that our main reasons for shopping via the web are the convenience of doing so at any time of day or night, and price considerations.

The credit crunch looks unlikely to deter dedicated shoppers – but it is making them more determined to buy at the best price, particularly with Christmas on the horizon. A third of those polled said they were planning to do most of their gift shopping online.

The survey – commissioned to coincide with Shopzilla's first ever Circle of Excellence Awards to recognise the UK's best online retailers as voted for by consumers – reveals that entertainment shopping (books, music, dvds etc) are the most frequently-purchased items, followed by clothing, shoes and jewellery, electronic items and computer hardware and software. The items we're least likely to buy online are cars, musical instruments and food and drink.

Feedback shows that online shoppers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their habits, with most spending time surfing to find the best deals. More than 39 per cent use price comparison sites, and more than half said feedback from other consumers about online
retailers was influential in their decision to buy. More than half gave internet "stores" a rating of eight or more out of ten – but only 28 per cent gave the bricks-and-mortar equivalent such a high score.

"With the credit crunch, people are not stopping their shopping, but they are looking for better deals," says Josian Chevallier of Shopzilla. "They avoid the leg work and parking and petrol costs; they can browse the price of the same item across a range of retailers, look at scores given by other shoppers, and often they're paying less online for an item than they would if they walked into the store on the High Street.

With the high street already in a straitened state, what does the boom in shopping in a solitary fashion by the twilight of a computer screen mean for our long-term retail habits, and will our increasing desire to shop at any hour in the 24 mean the death knell for the physical, sociable act of shopping?

"What seems to be happening at the moment is that many people are going into stores, particularly clothing stores, to look at and feel an item, then buying it online," says internet psychologist Graham Jones. That explains the lack of visible shopping bags in town, then.

"But more and more people are simply shopping online from stores they know they like. There's a lot less hassle, and you can usually get your size. But I think people will increasingly feel they are missing out on something – the social aspect of shopping with friends or a family member, possibly including lunch or coffee."

Jones says the shape of the future is that many retailers will find they sell far more online than in their bricks and mortar stores, and they may well go down the line of providing the social element of shopping by creating a coffee shop inside their clothes or electronics shop, where customers can browse, order and pay for merchandise on a terminal on their café table, and when ready to leave, pick up their purchases from a counter, in the style of Argos.

The explosion in online shopping means that even though high streets have been going through hard times, retailers' online sales make the picture look better.

"Online sales are subsiding high street outlets," says Jones. "But in the long-term, the boom in online shopping is forcing retailers to address what they will do with their stores in the future."