Amazon and online shopping means we don't realise how vital real shops are - Yorkshire Post Letters

I don’t always agree with what Andrew Vine writes, and I’ve had at least one letter printed which criticised him. So I’m particularly eager to say how much I admired his eloquent, well-argued claim (The Yorkshire Post, November 22) that “Trouble on the high street has roots in Amazon”.

Andrew says Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has effectively made his fortune by putting shops out of business.

I’m retired and can shop on the high street whenever I want. But I realise the attraction of online shopping for people working all hours just to survive. However we can’t go on like this, especially - as Andrew points out - when there is no online sales tax to create a slightly more level playing field for shops where “add to basket” means an actual basket, not a pretend one.

I too have shopped online for things I couldn’t get otherwise, and there’s another problem. The internet has closed so many shops that now there are many things we can only buy online – that is, if we have internet access, and many people still have not.

And the more we interact online, the less we meet face-to-face, and we may not realise how vital these actual meetings are for the human animal until they begin to disappear.

Back in 1909 author E.M. Forster wrote a chillingly prophetic story entitled “The Machine Stops”, in which most humans, having made the natural world uninhabitable, live underground in the vast Machine, isolated from each other and communicating by phone. The title reveals their fate. You have been warned.