Rural: Chris & Mialee

Chris and Mialee are in their mid-forties with three kids at school and live in an isolated property that is half a mile from the road, down a single track lane. Chris designs, invents and writes software from his office above the garage while Mialee works part-time in a neighbouring town. They have two cars and a veritable menagerie of animals and a sizeable vegetable garden.

Here, Chris tells us about the localnet services he and his family use and what a difference they have made to their lives.

Scroll down to read all the ways localnet impacts their lives or click on a bullet point below to jump to the item that most interests you.

Everyday services

Here's a typical day in our lives... followed by a ramble through the less frequent services we make use of since our village moved over to localnet last year.

Post, Papers and Breakfast Arrive

Before 8.00 every morning, someone delivers a couple of boxes to the house. I don’t have to be in or awake to receive them as they’re popped through a hatch in the exterior wall of our kitchen. I just open a double width kitchen cupboard and take out the boxes. The kids have christened it the “magic cupboard”. This has something to do with me paraphrasing a “Mr Benn” cartoon from my childhood when I first showed them how it worked. Opening the door with a flourish I announced “As if by magic, the post appeared”.

The boxes are each about the size of a large breakfast cereal box. One is yellow and the other is a pale brown and both have sealed lids. They are “our” boxes - they've got our name and address on them.

I open the lid of the yellow one and slide the contents out onto the kitchen table. It’s the morning post and my wife's morning paper. I stand the container up and immediately shove all the junk mail straight back in it. I then start to open the rest of the post, dropping the envelopes and things I’ve read but don’t need to keep back in the box. I grab yesterday’s paper and pop it in the box too before shutting the lid and putting it in the kitchen drawer next to the one I got it from so that its contents can be recycled (more on this later).

I then turn to the brown box. This one has a recessed tap on one corner – a bit like a wine box. I grab some glasses and pour the kids a glass of chilled orange juice that I know was freshly squeezed by our friends Sam and Jane at the LocalHub in the village that morning. We actually get three different juices depending on the day of the week - or what we felt like last night when we tapped in our breakfast order on the touch-screen before going to bed. I then open the lid of the box and take out a still warm pain au chocolat, leaving my wife’s favourite - the butter croissant in the insulated box to keep warm.

I notice that we’re running low on a few things in the fridge so I reach over to the touch-screen above the MagicCupboard and press “Staples”. Pictures of all our regular items pop up so I slide a pack of butter and pot of jam across the “sometime today” shopping basket picture. We're on our last pint of milk so I drag one across to the “next delivery” basket so I don't have to have black coffee this afternoon.

These items will be delivered through the same hole in the wall and if my wife tries to order them later they'll jump out of the shopping basket as she drops them in it and ask her to confirm that she really does want another one. At which point I get a brownie point for having ordered them - and immediately lose it for not having mentioned this to her.  This is a big improvement on the old days when we’d either end up with two tubs of butter or a plaintive “why didn’t you tell me you’d used the last of it”.

I could just leave the screen to time out and go back to our “home” page but I click “Done” because I want to see exactly where our local OmniVan is right now. The home page really does show our house – right at the centre of a map showing the local neighbourhood with the nearest localnet delivery routes and hubs marked on it. I spot the blue dot representing our OmniVan and the label above it shows me the current estimate of 43 minutes before it will be passing the end of the lane - so it's time to get Mialee and the kids up.

In the “bad old days” (before localnet) the post arrived around 10am, the paper when it felt like it and the milkman would only come down our lane every other day. The village shop over a mile away only had the basics so we had to buy breakfast things as part of our weekly shop - and frequently ran out of things or threw away stale goods.

School Run and Commuting

My wife, the newspaper, and the kids therefore leave the house at 08:32 today and walk to the main road to cross the path of our OmniVan's “home run” – when the OmniVan beetles back empty to its base at the LocalHub a mile and a half away. It’s an electric van and hums along at the twenty mile an hour speed limit we now have through all the villages here.

A few minutes later, the OmniVan approaches. They wave to the driver who we all know and jump into one of the three OmniPods in the back, sitting on basic fold-down seats for the five minute journey. At the end of the line the kids run off with their friends to catch the good old school bus which no longer has to detour into every residential street and hamlet as it used to

My wife walks across to the “big van” stop and waits for the next departure for the town centre. Like the OmniVan, this vehicle is multi-purpose and can change during the day from all goods delivery to all passenger seating – or, as it normally is on this run, 60/40 passengers to goods. The seats on this one are more comfortable than the OmniVan and in the twenty minute ride she'll get through most of the morning’s paper before arriving a block away from her workplace.

Before localnet, she had to get up half an hour earlier so she could drive the kids to school seven miles away and then head across country at right angles to this for another five miles to reach work by nine. Now, we've sold the second car and find it much more economical to use one of the electric cars from the LocalHub pool when we need to (but more on this later).

The cost of sending the kids to school via localnet is peanuts - and a piece of cake to book. The local schools all enter their term dates into localnet so guaranteeing a seat for the kids is simply a matter of dragging the picture of their school onto that of the OmniVan as many times as you have children. The system then knows how many seats are reserved on any given day and can lay on a larger OmniVan or change the balance of goods to seats as needed to ensure everyone gets where they need to.

Same Day Grocery Delivery

After they've gone, I remember that I’m running low on razor blades so, while I'm walking down to feed the chickens I pull up the localnet app on my iPhone and touch the “Groceries” icon. I see that my morning order of milk, butter and jam is already on its way and that my wife ordered some shaving foam already but no razor blades so I add those.

Our food bills are down about 20% since localnet started. Because we only need to think one day ahead, there’s far less waste than before as we know who will be eating with us tonight and how much of last night’s pie is left over – and whether or not I can face another portion of it.

We therefore don’t ever buy more than we need and the system remembers our preferences and roughly how long it takes us to get through boxes of things we use regularly. It does a pretty good job of predicting what we're about to need or that if we order some burgers, we'll probably want some rolls and relish too. I guess it's just using the tricks that Amazon, iTunes and others have developed from online shopping for books and music.

It's spooky... I grew up on the edge of a small village in Northern Ireland in the seventies. If we were running low on something, my Mum would ring Gerry at the village shop (about a mile away) and ask if he could take an order. She'd rattle off a dozen or so items and within an hour or two Gerry would ring the doorbell and hand over a cardboard box with everything we'd asked for in it. He'd then pop across the road with their box. Localnet feels like we just got back to the “right” way of doing things.

Automatic Replenishment

In fact, for many of these “staple” items, it goes one better: we have standing orders rather than have to worry about when they run out. Take the dried dog food for example. This just appears by magic in a box similar to the one the breakfast came in - albeit with a snazzy graphic on it like the one that used to be on the 20kg bags we had to lug home and store before localnet came. There’s no wasted packaging at all and no need to waste space in our kitchen with a big bin of food like we used to. The price per kilo is now the same as it was in the huge sack and we know the next box will turn up on the day we finish the current one off - at least it will as long as we put the box back on the shelf in the utility/dog room where it belongs.

The shelf must have a sensor and transmitter in it because it can tell when the box is almost empty and must tell to the MagicCupboard we need another one. I think there's a battery in the shelf but it seems to run for years without having to be replaced - probably due to the little solar panel on the edge of the shelf that keeps it topped up.

We have another of these MagicShelves in the kitchen and also one in the fridge. The kitchen one is hidden behind a cupboard door as the boxes don’t really fit the “rustic oak” look my wife has made me struggle hard to achieve. She enjoys cooking and we rather a lot of pets and three kids, we end up filling our shelves with the following:

Our MagicShelf in the... Holds boxes of
Utility Room Washing powder
Dry dog food
Dry cat food
Dog food sachets
Cat food sachets
Toilet Rolls
Wild bird seed
Kitchen Breakfast cereal (three different boxes)
Flour (plain and self-raising in separate compartments)
Pasta (three different types in one box)
Rice
Olive oil
Sugar (white, caster and icing)
Tea, coffee and hot chocolate
Fridge Milk
Orange Juice
White Wine
Beer
Eggs

Some of these boxes are sent back when they're empty and replaced by new ones. These don't have to be completely full for things we don't use that frequently. We normally order a half-box of rice and a third of olive oil at a time. Others - typically the ones with internal compartments like the tea and coffee one, we just refill from bags that arrive with the groceries. Because there's hardly any demand for huge boxes of things now, there are far fewer options needed on the normal lists of goods and the whole selection process is much simpler.

This rack has our favourite breakfast cereals, pasta, flour, sugar, cooking oil, teabags and so on.  Some of them we only get a half or a third of a box at a time but that’s just part of the standing order setup.

Chilled and Frozen Goods Delivery

When we order groceries that are chilled or frozen, they appear in different sections of the MagicCupboard. The cupboard seems to know when it is about to be needed as it isn't always cold - only when a box of chilled or frozen goods is expected. This keeps them at the right temperature till we transfer them to the fridge so it’s not a problem if ice cream arrives just after we’ve gone out.

After we empty or remove the box it stops chilling and returns to room temperature after several hours. We could have paid more for our delivery hatch and had one that actually incorporated the whole fridge and freezer but as we anticipated, now that we can order anything and have in our MagicCupboard within a few hours, there's really much less need for the huge fridge and freezer that used to dominate the end of our kitchen.

We've gone back from an enormous American style monstrosity and a chest freezer in the garage to a single combined unit in the kitchen - like my parents had thirty years ago when they walked to the local shop every other day. The new on is much cheaper to run and frees up space. It's almost as convenient to order items via the touchpad as it was to persuade someone to go out to the freezer in the rain and rummage around for frozen pizza! I'm guessing the big cold-room at the LocalHub is a sight more efficient than our old freezer was - and they probably know just how many years that bag of pork chops has been hiding in the corner!

The grocery order normally comes on the lunchtime delivery round so it’s waiting for us when my wife gets home on the days she works a half-day. While a lot of the stuff on the magic shelves comes in boxes that look much like our morning PaperBox, most of the other items come in a larger box that's about the size of the cardboard boxes we used to carry items home from the supermarket in (in the days before the evil carrier bag).

The MagicCupboard 

There are actually four doors on the MagicCupboard - making it the size of two double kitchen units. Behind each door there is room for two  OmniBoxes, one above the other. Behind each door is a separate compartment. Three of the compartments seem to know what temperature the boxes in them need and automatically act as:

The doors aren't hinged. The whole of the front pulls out bringing the boxes out with it - much like our old slide-out bin drawer did. There's an opening in the wall of the house that knows when the OmniVan is here and automatically unlocks as the new delivery approaches. A security interlock means that the outside hatch won't open unless the doors are all shut on the inside and vice versa. The cupboard “pings” at you if you leave a door open too long - much like our enormous old fridge used to.

Daily Recycling and Refuse Collection

The box our groceries arrive in most days has a pair of dividers at right-angles that can be pushed out of the way, flush up against the sides or used to split the box into four. When it arrives, the dividers are keeping the bottles upright but once I’ve emptied it I’ll pull out the fourth compartment of the MagicCupboard. The back of this cupboard is also accessible from outside and anything put in here gets collected within twenty-four hours.

The bottom shelf of this cupboard holds the previous PaperBox with its waste paper for recycling and a similarly sized box into which we put non-recyclable waste. The top drawer holds one of the  OmniBoxes like the one I’ve just emptied. Well it would – but as the delivery driver left our grocery order for us, he’ll have taken the one from the recycling shelf away (even it was still empty as otherwise I end up with too many boxes). So I now pop the new box in the drawer, pushing the dividers into roughly the middle to separate the four corners of the box – into which go glass, metal, plastic and compostable waste.

Anything we put in that compartment gets whisked away for recycling or disposal and the boxes are then cleaned to food hygiene standards before being reused. I know the waste paper is processed immediately at the LocalHub so I don’t have to worry about shredding credit card bills and the like before they go in there.

If we have any other empty boxes – such as the pet food and juice containers mentioned earlier - we just put them in the “magic” cupboard and they get collected and cleaned. The system knows where every box is and how heavy it is so we never have to ask someone to visit to collect empty containers. The waste and recyclables are removed within twenty-four hours and don’t clutter up the kitchen or cause a smell as they used to when collections were weekly. Best of all, we get real money credit for every kilogramme of recyclable waste that we feed into that cupboard. Each of the categories has a separate rate per kilogramme. We use it as part of the kids’ pocket money – which really encourages them to think about which bin they put their rubbish in.

Laundry and Ironing

The best thing about Localnet though is the laundry service. A box full of dirty laundry goes into the MagicCupboard most days and a box of clean, ironed and folded clothes comes out. We use the basic, and very affordable, 48 hour turnaround service which lets local residents earn some money from home by doing the ironing. We’ve now consigned our ironing board to the garage and as we hardly ever use the washing machine now, we’re going to save space by replacing it and the tumble drier with a combined washer/drier. It’ll be a little less efficient than the separate ones but 90% of our washing is now being done in the much more efficient central washers or someone else’s. The dogs love the extra space for their bed in the utility room!

The Village has Come Alive

We've lived here for twelve years now and in that time the couple who owned and lived above the village shop and post office struggled to make ends meet and did not have a great quality of life. A few years ago they sold up to a chain of convenience stores. The shop gained a number of product lines and got a bit smarter but lost all its character and the staff don't seem to have the passion for it they once did. Newspaper deliveries are erratic and often too late. The post office struggles to cope in the run up to Christmas and the prices are not terribly competitive.

Since localnet came to the area and the new LocalHub opened in the middle of the village, the place has been transformed. The airy, central atrium with its coffee shop is now a meeting place frequented by all and sundry. The catchment area for this LocalHub extends two miles in each direction from the centre of the village, taking in three tiny villages that haven't had a shop in decades. For the first time, everyone in the area can get a free lift into the village on the localnet vans. The elderly, those without a car during the day and those with small children can at last come into what is now a buzzing and vibrant “micro-mall”. We've made some terrific new friends who live on a mile or two from us but we had never met before.

Because more and more people in the area are able to work from home, the bakery, shops and ad hoc market stalls in the centre are thriving. The staff almost all live within the catchment area of the hub and commute to work on the vans as well. There's a real sense of community starting to build.

We've also found that crime, especially vandalism and anti-social behaviour is down. The dozen or so drivers that serve the area from the LocalHub all know the area intimately - unlike the courier van drivers who used to steam through relying on their sat-navs for directions. Our team recognises the local troublemakers - and know their parents! We all trust the local team and with a team of two on most vans most parents are happy for even quite young kids to treat them as free taxis when they want to visit their friends in the neighbouring villages.

At least once a week...

So much for the (literally) every-day post, papers, breakfast, transportation, grocery, recycling and refuse collection. Let me tell you about the “bells and whistles” that we use regularly.

Home Cooking

I like to cook for the family occasionally but I’m not a great cook and I never know what spices or other exotic ingredients are or, more importantly, are not in the cupboard. Life’s much simpler now. The kids and I will often choose a recipe they like while they're having breakfast. Our regular favourites are on short-cuts on the touchpad over the MagicCupboard but at least once a week we'll go online from the computer and search for something a bit more adventurous. If it's for that night, we check the box saying “available for tonight” and know that all the recipes we're shown can be made from items that localnet has in stock and could deliver to us in time to prepare the meal.

Having selected a recipe and tapped on the right number to tell it how many people will be eating it the ingredient list with appropriate quantities pops up straight away. Some will be in the “green” section - for example, the system knows that we've got enough rice in the box on the magic shelf in the kitchen. Others are in amber - such as those it knows we've ordered and are still within their sell-by date - and others are in red if it is fairly sure we don't have them. I just have to tap the check or cross next to each one to confirm which should be sent to me. I can see the total cost altering as I make my choices.

The system is pretty good at presenting the most appropriate menus. If I’m cooking for two, for example, it doesn’t show me whole roast turkey recipes. It’s also getting smarter at suggesting recipes each time as I click on the thumbs up or thumbs down symbols on whole recipes or individual ingredients. We're also getting more adventurous as we follow some of the “People who liked this also liked...” recommendations.

So with just few taps I can order everything I need to cook the recipe. Often, though I’ll spend a few more seconds refining the order. I might take more than the suggested amount of white wine vinegar as I know my wife uses it often and we ran out yesterday. For many of the ingredients, there are actually two or three options shown. These would include the following.

Cutlery, Crockery and Utensil Hire

We can even try out recipes that would previously have been impossible because we didn't have an essential piece of kitchen equipment or utensil. We can simply touch the button next to the item we want to have the required item turn up along with the ingredients! Although we've been married twenty something years and hence have collected a mountain of crockery and cutlery, many of our friends prefer to order these along with the ingredients if they are having a dinner party.

Because it's so simple to hire stuff - no extra forms, no separate bill or deposit - we just do it without thinking now.

Life's too Short for Washing-up

My favourite optional extra on the hire service though is the “Life's too short” option. For a few pence extra this lets you send everything you've hired back dirty! It certainly takes away the temptation to lend a hand cleaning up after the dinner party. It takes all of five minutes to pack the lot back in the boxes and shove them in the MagicCupboard.

Ready-prepared or Ready-made

Sometimes, life is too short for cooking. Now we have the option of clicking the one of two “Cheat” buttons on the recipe pages. If we see a meal we want to try but don't have time (or the skills) to cook, we can ask for it to be delivered “Oven Ready” - fully prepared ready to pop in the oven (with instructions and timer set automatically on the MagicCupboard's touch-screen as you take the tray out of the box it arrived in.

We can see on the localnet screen which chefs are on duty that day and what their skills, specialities and their personal recommendations are based on the fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables that they have to hand at the LocalHub kitchens. As this service becomes more popular, they're gradually ramping up the number of chefs on the payroll so we get a wider variety of choices all the time.

If you're really feeling lazy - or the Aga just went out - there's always the final button “Ready to Eat” - though some menus do show warnings that it may not be quite as tasty as the picture looks if it has to be delivered after being cooked. This works beautifully for a lot of salads, cold starters and puddings though.

Locally Cooked Food

Altogether, the home cooking service not only encourages me to cook more often, it makes me more adventurous, saves a huge amount of time and is much more likely to result in something edible than when I tried to cook the old way!

If I feel like cheating even more, there’s a huge range of home cooking on offer. Lots of the good cooks in the village put up their “specialities” on the “Local Food” page. These range from chutneys and jams to Victoria sponges and lasagnes. Several of them have awesome reputations around the area and often their produce is fully booked for days in advance. Without the overhead of premises, travel to work or expensive pickup/delivery and so on the prices are very reasonable – only a couple of pounds above the cost of the ingredients for a lasagne that is more than enough for four of us. Of course, not all of the cooks or dishes are anything to write home about but there’s a great feedback process that lets us see what other people thought of them. Some of the cooks who make serious money from the service do a “tasting box” with samples of their main recipes in and we’ll often try that before ordering from someone we’ve not tried before.

Take-aways Get Delivered

Before localnet, we really struggled to get any sort of take-away delivered. Now there are several choices of Indian, Chinese, burgers, pizzas, kebabs and fish and chips. These shops take orders via the localnet and deliver a batch to the LocalHub every hour during the evenings or half-hour on Friday and Saturday nights. The localnet vans have heated containers that they use on these runs so the food is normally hotter than if you'd gone to fetch it in the car. We're gradually seeing several of these take-aways move to be closer to - or even inside - the LocalHub and the delivery times from these are terrific.

It's terrific having all the local options just two taps away on the localnet touch-screen (or on my iPhone if I'm too lazy to get to the kitchen). I just touch “Food” and slide the list of icons across till I spot the one for the pizza shop.

Sharing Books, Vegetables, Cuttings

My wife is a prodigious reader of novels so every bookcase in the house is already full. Now she’s stopped buying so many. Instead of one-click purchasing a book on Amazon, she’ll borrow one from the library service. It’s the same one click and the book appears via the magic kitchen cupboard in the same, or often less time than it takes to get an Amazon delivery.

We also like fresh produce but with our clay soil can only grow a limited range of produce well. So we have a standing order on the localnet for a wide range of locally grown vegetables. Any time someone in the area has too much for themselves they know they can offer it on the localnet and they’ll make up a box with our order in to be collected from their house and delivered to ours on the following round.

The people and farms that we have bought from appear as pictures on our favourites page on the localnet touch-screen so it's really quick to see what they're selling or what they are looking for when it comes to trading produce.

Those with more time on their hands than I have, tell me they also use the system to share or sell seedlings and cuttings when they have too many.

There are a couple of local farms that make up vegetable boxes which get delivered through the system too. Unlike the old system where they'd just send out a random mixture to everyone, and we’d end up with a box which the kids wouldn’t eat – we can now see exactly what they’ve got available and order if for same day delivery. They use the dividers in the  OmniBox to split up to four sorts of fruit or vegetables in the box without using a single plastic bag!

Trying New Things

We used to be in a wine club which meant a courier drove a three tonne van a whole mile to and from our house to deliver a case once a quarter with two bottles of each of six varieties. We’d love a couple of them but often didn’t like the others so much – but were then stuck with having to finish the rest off. Now we get one bottle of their choice in our price bracket every Friday night and if we like it we click on the “more of the same please” button and stock up on this one. If we don’t like it, we click on some of the feedback buttons and the sommelier (or maybe it’s just a computer program) tries to suit our tastes better on the next one. It seems to be learning fast.

Passing things on

We’ve always used eBay to sell expensive items that the kids have grown out of but for anything under a fiver, the hassle of setting up the auction, handling the queries, wrapping and posting the item just isn’t worth it. Now we use the localnet local auction for all of this stuff. We just click the appropriate category, type in a brief description of the item and click one of the price buttons – £1 through £10. If someone wants it, we get a message to pop it in one of the  OmniBoxes and put it in the “magic” cupboard. It will then appear in someone else’s MagicCupboard.

They can then decide whether or not to keep the item. If they put the box back in empty, they get charged and we get credited. If they put it back, we get the item back the next day – no packaging waste, no-one travelled anywhere they wouldn’t have done otherwise and 90% of the time they’re happy with it and we get paid.

Charity Shop Donations

A nice feature of the local market system is that if we’ve put something up for sale but no-one has bought it a fortnight later, it’ll remind you that the item is still there and pop up a list of local charities that are accepting goods of this type via the localnet. You just click on the one you want to donate it to and pop it in a box to be collected. No hassle, no packaging waste and no cost to you or the charity. With lots of items we just send them straight off to charity in the first place. It doesn’t seem to require the effort it used to!

We Sold our Other Car

The LocalHub has a pool of electric cars that we can hire any time we want. We’ve done away with our second car now that the kids go on the OmniVan to school and Mialee gets the OmniVan and then bus to and from work. Because we're now a one car family we qualify for better rates and priority booking of the pool cars. If I got rid of our remaining car or switched it for an electric one or even a more economical petrol one I’d get even better rates – but that may be a step too far. Maybe next year.

The cars are easy and cheap to hire as there’s no fuel charge and the insurance is included. The batteries are always fully charged when we take a car and if we need to top up en route – say if I was going long distance - I just stop off at another delivery hub where they simply push the battery pack out one side as they slide a new one in the other side. It takes less time than filling a tank and as you don't have to pay there and then, you’re off again in a couple of minutes.

My wife really likes the one-way hire option. During the school holidays she’ll hire an electric car on the Monday and drive herself and the kids to her friends in Brighton or London. They grab another car for the return journey on Friday but don’t need one while the kids are enjoying the seaside or the city during the week.

Part-time and Home-working

My wife gave up her old full-time job as she can now make enough working from home several days a week doing what she used to travel to the factory to do. She takes delivery of boxes of components a few times a week through, you guessed it, the MagicCupboard and puts boxes of assembled goods back in it for collection.  Because of the lower overheads her employer has and the reduced travel and child-minding costs we incur, he can afford to pay her as much for thirty hours a week as he used to for a full forty-hour week and she only needs to earn as much as she used to from twenty hours a week. Her employer still needs forty hours of work done a week so he now employs another part-time worker on the same basis. She can also do the work when she wants to and fit it around school and the kids’ activities. Everyone’s a winner.

Local Services

Other people within our localnet area offer all sorts of services – many of them working from home. With the cost of sending and receiving stuff in the local area now just a few pence per box and so convenient, it makes things economic that we wouldn’t have thought of before. Many of these are things that we used to be able to have done on the High Street before the businesses folded as they weren’t economical to run from town centre premises or keep people on full time. Several of them are partly run from the LocalHub but use home-workers for some parts of the process. Here are some examples from our LocalHub's “Local Services” page.

Nearby Services

Our “nearby” area is the region served by all the surrounding LocalHubs s and those that share the same distribution centre as ours. Delivery to and from these can't be guaranteed same day but is always next day at the latest. It costs a little more to send stuff to these LocalHubs s that within our own but still much less than the postage used to be.

Within this area, there are even more services available – most of which just wouldn’t have been viable if we had to travel to or from them or pay a £5 delivery charge on each order as we did in the days of the “Post Office”! Reading from our “Nearby Services” page I can see

With some of the services, like repairs especially, we’ll send the item, then a quote for the work appears on our home page which we’ll either accept or click the “No thanks – please return” or “Oh well... bin it” options. If it’s something valuable or we want proof that we sent it in good condition we can just click the “photograph it” option and know that the contents of the box will be snapped in high-def at the hub before being sent on to the service provider. The insurance cover for items sent is so much better than the old postage service. The photo serves as proof the item existed and was in good condition so if it's damaged in transit or by the company working on it there's less argument and a prompt payout.

No Waiting In for Deliveries

In the bad old days I’d often find a card on the doormat telling us that we’d missed a “signed-for” delivery and one of us would have to go the trouble of staying in the following day or driving to the depot to collect it. Now all courier deliveries are via the MagicCupboard and there’s no need to sign for anything as the system knows that the driver put the box into the cupboard and you took it out.

“Pop out for Something” Only When it Makes Sense

With so much available for same day delivery it’s now rare that either of us have to go out in the car just to fetch something. Occasionally there’s a need to deliver something though. Having to go out to post a letter or a parcel is definitely a thing of the past as we just put it in a box in the magic cupboard and it’s collected “automagically”.

The last thing I thought I’d have to “pop out” for was to get a new front door key cut. Using the map on our home page, it was just a matter of clicking roughly where the shop is. I was instantly shown on screen how long it would take me to drive, catch the next OmniVan, cycle or walk there versus letting localnet deliver the item and return the goods back to me.

It also showed me the impact on the environment and how much exercise I’d get for each of the choices. This has really encouraged me to use my bike more – especially as it instantly downloads the route directions onto my phone instead of the car’s sat-nav when I choose that option. 

Choosing at Home

There are a number of services where a selection of items is sent to you, you buy what you want and send the rest back. These are really popular with the elderly neighbours who find it difficult to get out to the shops – and they get free delivery on these services!

Greeting cards are a popular service. Our elderly neighbour just has to tell the delivery man she needs a birthday card for a ten year grandson and on the next round she’ll be given a box of twenty suitable ones to choose from.

A lot of collectors use this service to circulate their unwanted stamps, postcards and so on. They’ll quite often send their boxes on from one customer to the next without getting them back till they’re nearly all sold.

All in All…

Overall, our life has changed significantly. We all use less, waste less, share more and have much more time left for fun stuff. I just wish it had been invented ten years sooner! (Authors note: Actually it was invented in 1998, but the world wasn't quite ready for it. Oil was still too cheap and technology too expensive back then).

Benefits