Whenever a new way doing things is introduced, it’s naturally met with a lot of resistance, especially if it’s something which has been done a certain way for a really long time. Most of the resistance comes from the established players who have been enjoying some sort of monopoly over the monetisation channels of whatever it is that has become an established way of doing things, while the disruptors on the other hand also stand to gain a lot financially out of their disruption going mainstream. So it’s pretty much a matter of financial interests going up against each other, which isn’t all that bad really because ultimately the consumer always benefits in the end.
Digitising one’s operations is one such area of development in which a lot of arguments for and against this disruption continue to be tabled in a battle that rages on. If you look at it from an environmental perspective, the establishment makes some very strong arguments in pointing out that running servers, even just for something as simple as emailing purposes, has more of an impact on the environment than the process of perhaps cutting down trees to manufacture the paper to otherwise be used to send traditional snail mail. If you scrutinise the points of this argument over the longer term however, running a server on something like renewable energy, over a longer period perhaps spanning decades, the environmental friendliness swings the way of the email servers over cutting down trees to produce paper.
So it ultimately all depends on how you look at it, but one thing that’s for sure is that going online and digitising as much as one’s operations as is possible works out in the favour of the average consumer. Just how much money do you save online, taking into account only the shopping aspect of doing all your things online?
The biggest and perhaps most obvious money-saving factor of shopping online is that of saving on fuel costs or on costs associated with whatever other mode of transport you’d be using to physically visit a store, shopping mall, or complex. In reality though, the savings don’t end there. Imagine you had about three items on your shopping list — not necessarily physical items, but perhaps one of which is buying a lottery ticket or maybe wagering a bet on the weekend’s sport, while the other two could be buying your dinner and perhaps buying bread and milk for the next day.
Doing all of these things physically not only costs you fuel, but you’re likely going to spend more on some things you didn’t originally plan on buying, like a bar of chocolate when you pay for your bread and milk, etc. If you rather do all of those things online, perhaps using a site like M88 to buy your sports betting wager and accepting delivery by drone for the physical items you purchase, not only is everything done for free online (apart from what you’re already paying for your internet connection), but there’s a knock-on effect on the savings. You’re saving some paper because nobody has to print your sports betting ticket and physically hand it to you and you’re also opening the door up to the retailers lowering the costs of what they offer you because their own production costs are lowered as a result of being able to sell their goods in a virtual environment instead of a physical one.
So, whenever you shop online, you save a whole lot more than you may realise.