I suppose when you are successful multinational, untroubled by the taxation levels that the rest of us endure on our comparatively minuscule earnings, wastage becomes a less important issue.

In this case I am thinking of Amazon, although other vast global monoliths are available. It is our fault too. We have colluded unwittingly perhaps, but willingly, in the decimation of the high street and the demise of chain stores that have been in our lives for generations as reliable go-to and buy-from outlets.

Then along comes armchair shopping. You can sit at home and look online at a vast array of goods and services and in a leisurely way, if you wish, arrive at a decision about what you want, need or simply must have.

My latest experience however has given this stay-at-home shopper pause for thought. I am already getting employment offers for next year (amazingly) and needed a desk diary for my office, as I like to call it, and one by the phone in the kitchen. I ordered two A5 spiral sided week at a view diaries.

They arrived the following day in two separate identical boxes which could easily have contained 200 desk diaries, or two ukuleles each or the complete box set of Game of Thrones eight times over. They were 55cms x 21cms x 12cms and packed with screwed up brown paper to stop the content rattling ludicrously presumably. One medium sized Jiffy bag could have transported both via the postal service.

Yes, I could order it from home. Yes, it was the market price and saved me the trouble and expense of going out looking for it, but did it really need a pressurised Amazon employee, desperately avoiding failing to make his ‘pack by’ threshold to keep his job, to grab the nearest box and pack two identical things going to the same address separately.

Many of their drivers too, despite being efficient and inoffensive, show signs of caring more about their delivery rate than waiting for you get to the front door when they ring the bell. I have on occasion chased a rapidly retreating van waving my arms dementedly, when I fail to get there quickly enough.

Efficiency is good, so discouraging drivers and packers from having an hourly fag break is a good idea, but there’s no need to harry them into insane activity. Targets are so often unhelpful and counterproductive.