We live in the age of convenience, where giving the consumer what they want and quickly is the overriding priority for many in the world of business.

I would be a hypocrite if I neglected to mention that I’ve previously benefited from same day delivery of printer ink, and then there’s the fact that I have bored everyone I know with how I couldn’t live without the weekly delivery of our online ‘big shop’.

But there are limits – during the madness of a recent commute on the human sardine factory that is the London Underground I couldn’t fail but notice the posters advertising a service that gets a 99p bottle of milk to your door in minutes.

I could possibly see the point if it were the remotest part of the North Yorkshire Moors we were talking about but it’s London, a bustling metropolis where you can find somewhere to buy milk about every 100 yards.

Stornoway has been voted one of the happiest places in the UK

placeholder image — Stornoway has been voted one of the happiest places in the UK

These days, convenience is seen by everyone as a birthright. Well, almost everyone.

Up in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, there is an old-fashioned row rumbling on about a plan by the nation’s biggest supermarket chain, Tesco, to open its local branch on Sundays. Yup, that’s right, the good people of the Isle of Lewis can only shop six days a week – 30 years on from the Sunday Trading Act, which has since meant that most of the rest of the UK can buy potato waffles and muesli pretty much whenever they please.

While I certainly can’t speak for everyone in that part of the world, it does seem that the proposal by the retail giant to bring Sunday trading to the Outer Hebrides is incredibly unpopular with some, including local church leaders and those who have signed a petition calling for it to be stopped.

I don’t know much about Stornoway but after a couple of minutes on the interweb, I now know that it has been voted one of the happiest places in the UK, even though they can’t nip to the shops on the day of rest when they run out of Bisto for the roast.

While Sunday trading in the rest of the country is very much now a way of life, would the world really end if we couldn’t do the shopping whenever we fancied it? More to the point, is anyone really that busy that they can’t live without their groceries being delivered to their door?

The consumer – and I include myself in this – isn’t always right.