27 July 2026 by Mondo2.0
From I Love Shopping to I Love Delivery
Over the past twenty years, e-commerce has become an integral part of everyday life. According to the B2C eCommerce Observatory of the Polytechnic University of Milan and Netcomm, online purchases in Italy will exceed €62 billion by 2025, involving over 35 million people. It is no longer an alternative purchasing method, but a widespread behavior that spans generations and social classes.
Every day, millions of people buy a book, an over-the-counter medicine, an item of clothing, an electronic component, or book a trip without entering a store, without speaking to a clerk, and often without even interrupting what they’re doing. All it takes is a few taps on a smartphone screen.
It might seem like just a technological step. In reality, it’s something much deeper. E-commerce, along with social networks, chats, and videoconferencing platforms, hasn’t just changed the way we shop: it’s transformed our relationship with time, space, waiting, and, indirectly, with the work of the people who make these experiences possible.
The shelf has become virtually infinite, and its organization no longer depends on the arrangement of the products, but on the algorithms that decide which ones to show us first.
The decision-making process has also changed. Where once, choices were influenced by the store’s layout, today they’re driven by user interface design and reviews. We don’t just choose from thousands of products: we choose from a selection that other systems have already built for us.
But the most interesting change concerns time: waiting has always been a natural part of purchasing. People waited for a letter, a book ordered from a bookstore, a piece of furniture. Waiting was part of the experience .
E-commerce has gradually changed this perception. Two- or three-day delivery has become the norm. Then came next-day delivery, same-day delivery, and, in some large cities, even delivery within a few hours.
Perhaps it’s here that we can see the cultural shift evoked by the famous title “I Love Shopping.” While in the early 2000s, the desire was primarily to live the in-store experience: trying on, interacting, and purchasing, today the focus has shifted largely to the immediacy of the purchase and shipping costs.
We went from “I Love Shopping” to “I Love Delivery”.
The object still matters, but the time it takes for it to reach our hands has become part of its value.
In sociology, this phenomenon can be read as a progressive acceleration of social time.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes acceleration as one of the hallmarks of contemporary modernity: technology doesn’t just make us do things faster, it changes collective expectations about what we consider an acceptable time.
This decreased tolerance for waiting ends up extending to other aspects of daily life: from communications to services, to personal and professional relationships.
Every online purchase is accompanied by increasingly detailed information about its journey. We can track every step of the way, from order processing to delivery, often observing the courier’s movements in real time.
We don’t just look at the product: we look at the logistics process.
The result is a paradox: technology has made visible a work that previously remained hidden.
It’s reasonable to wonder whether this transparency has also changed our way of perceiving time: what we have available and what we consider necessary for something to get done.
Speed thus becomes a social value that extends far beyond commerce.
We buy a product, but at the same time we also buy the feeling of being able to compress time.
We haven’t simply digitized the act of purchasing. We’ve redefined the very meaning of waiting, transforming time into a resource we demand to manage and compress .
It’s a transformation that affects commerce, but it also reveals a lot about contemporary society. Behind the promise of immediacy coexist ever-higher expectations and a work organization forced to sustain paces that until a few years ago would have seemed unrealistic. The debate over working conditions in logistics also stems from this growing social demand for speed.
Every technological innovation, even before changing the tools we use, changes the expectations with which we view the world. And when our relationship with time changes, the society we live in inevitably changes as well.
Perhaps this is precisely the meaning of Mondo 2.0: not just to talk about new technologies, but to understand how they are changing our way of living, choosing, and even waiting.
Or, perhaps, a return to the origins, to ” slow shopping ” awaits us around the corner.
Mondoduepuntozero Also read the article “ Social shopping & Purchase on ”, which is far from recent but still extremely relevant.