Rose-tinted glasses obscure our view of the future

THERE was an air of vultures circling a still-breathing carcass yesterday in my local HMV.

Obviously I went there as soon as I heard about the administrators, in the vague hope that the 3-for-€20 deal had changed to 20-for-€3. No such luck. The place was heaving, full of people rifling through CDs and DVDs although the queue at the till was tiny. Maybe people were coming in for that most pleasurable but economically useless of activities — the protracted aimless browse, before going home to order online.

We all love a good browse, yet this solitary pursuit is about to become endangered. For this I feel a bit sad — you can’t browse on Amazon the way you can mooch to your heart’s content in an actual shop crammed with tangible stuff. However, there seems little point in getting all weepy and nostalgic about the closure of chains like HMV (apart from sympathising, of course, with those losing their jobs), while the reality is that it was us, the credit card-carrying public, who shut them down. Mooching and browsing is all very nice, but who in their right mind is actually going to do their music and film shopping somewhere that charges way over the online odds, and makes you physically schlep into town for the privilege?