Glastonbury tickets are easier to get, one exasperated shopper tweeted, while another revealed that she had set her alarm for 4.30am to log on to Tesco’s website. As the coronavirus outbreak gripped the country, supermarket delivery slots suddenly had become gold dust.
Frustrations boiled over as shoppers failed to understand why Britain’s biggest supermarkets, which had spent the previous three decades trying to sell people as many items as possible, were suddenly denying them. What many failed to realise, however, was that although the four big supermarket chains control two thirds of the food market, online groceries had been trundling along with a meagre 7 per cent share, despite continued chatter about consumers switching to internet shopping.
The pandemic has brought a seismic shift. The
