The mall was the newcomer once

People in Abu Dhabi talk about the big malls as the place where shopping properly happens. You touch the thing, try it on, run into a neighbour by the escalator, and stay for dinner.

Online shopping, in that telling, is the intruder. It thins the corridors and turns an evening out into a parcel left by the door.

It is a fair worry. It is also, almost word for word, the worry people had about the malls.

When the large air-conditioned centres arrived, the complaint was that they would hollow out the old markets, the narrow lanes of small traders who knew their customers by name. Families would drive to a car park instead of walking to the shop on the corner. Something warm and local would be swapped for something big and the same everywhere.

Some of that came true. And the old markets themselves had once been the new arrangement, pulling trade away from whatever came before them, to the irritation of whoever had been doing well under the previous order.

Every comfortable habit was a disruption to somebody. The mall that now feels like the natural home of a weekend evening was, a generation ago, the thing a shopkeeper in the old quarter lay awake about.

None of this means the newest thing is always better. It means that loyalty to the present arrangement is a choice about timing, not a law of nature. It is easy to side with the way things are.

It is worth remembering that the way things are began as an invasion.