So, I've just once again put my trust in delivery companies to get an address right and follow fairly simple instructions about what to do because I'll be out when they arrive. But I do want them tomorrow, or I would not have paid the premium to get it delivered quickly rather than wait a week.

But if that had been Tesco I would have been able to sign up for a particular time slot when hopefully it would have been convenient for me to be around to take delivery personally, even in the evenings or at weekends. If this is the way of commerce in the future, mainstream delivery firms, whose main business is shipment and delivery rather than grocery sales of course, need to do something similar.

Is it just their size that makes Tesco viable doing it? I suspect not - there are ways I am sure retailers could collaborate in a delivery service. Is it because Tesco probably tend to concentrate on what business courier services would say were "out of hours"? Maybe, but it's surely a very logical growth area? Is it the logistics? All goods in the Tesco system are there at the local store or you don't get them. You could make such a system of convenient time slots contingent on the goods getting into the shipping system at a particular time perhaps.

Either way, it needs to happen. If the deliveries are not delivered properly tomorrow it's a twenty mile round trip, and, without taking time off work to do it, not till a week Saturday, to go and fetch it from the local courier depot during opening hours - the very least they could do would be to staff those delivery offices till late at night and at weekends and allow people to collect goods "out of hours".

In the future the big high volume shipping and delivery companies are going to control more and more of our commerce; they need persuading to change their MO to fit around the lives of an increasing proportion of their clients' customers.