People will always want to touch the cloth

A fabric trader in Deira has a line he has used for years, whenever someone suggests putting his stock online. People will always want to touch the cloth, he says. Buying it through a screen is something the young are trying out, and they will come back.

He says it with the calm of someone who has watched many enthusiasms come and go. And he has. He has seen neighbours rush into things that were gone within a season. His caution has saved him money more than once.

But the evidence he watches is the noise: a seller everybody talks about one month, closed the next. What he does not watch is quieter and more stubborn. Delivery that arrives at the door the following day. Returns that cost the buyer nothing. A generation that has bought shoes and phones without handling them first and does not remember finding that strange.

None of that is a craze. It is plumbing, and plumbing tends to stay.

It is genuinely hard to tell the difference from the middle of it. Some new habits fade, and the people who bet everything on them look foolish. Others settle into the walls of daily life, and the people who waited look foolish for longer.

The tempting move, when change is unsettling, is to call it a fad and feel wise. Dismissal costs nothing today and sounds like experience.

That is exactly what makes it risky. Of all the positions available, cynicism is the least effort, and it does an excellent impression of good sense.