Every year it is over

Every year since buying things online became ordinary across the Gulf, someone announces that the good part is over.

First it was that people here would always want to touch a thing before paying for it. Then that delivery would never be quick enough outside the big cities. Then that the feeds were too crowded for a small seller to be seen, that shoppers had stopped trusting strangers, that the easy growth had all been taken.

Each prediction sounds sensible when it is made. Each is made by someone who knows the trade. And the number of people making them seems to grow faster than the thing they say is ending.

Meanwhile a woman in Al Barsha opens a shop selling something nobody else sells, finds a few hundred people who care, and then a few hundred more. A man in Deira works out a cheaper way to get parcels to Fujairah. Somebody fixes the trust problem one honest product page at a time.

Nothing grows for ever. At some point the forecasters will be right, and they will remind us. But being right eventually is not the same as being useful now.

The forecast costs nothing to make. It asks nothing of the person making it, except patience and the pleasure of being proven correct.

The other job is harder and far less admired. It is to make the ground on which things can keep getting better: the better product, the cleaner delivery, the promise that is kept.

That job does not predict the future. It changes the odds of the one we get.