The art of letter writing is dead. You can send cards electronically, and even the gas bill now arrives as an email. It all adds up to bad news for Royal Mail, so you’d think the UK’s postmen and women would be thanking their lucky stars for the one glimmer of light for their stricken industry: the rise of online retail.

Despite the downturn and inevitable slowing of online sales, multichannel remains the big growth area in retail at the moment, and while the big boys like Tesco and Marks & Spencer continue to build their online offers, the handful of retailers that have thus far resisted, like Zara and H&M, are giving in and building transactional sites.

All good stuff and it shows how retailers are working hard to meet shoppers’ demands to be able to buy when, where and how it suits them. Carriers, including Royal Mail, have played a vital role in this. So how ironic that this very positive story is in danger of being stymied by strike action by the nation’s posties.

Retailers will find ways of ensuring their products reach their customers, and alternative delivery providers will already be out to get business from retail customers worried about Royal Mail – although they can be expensive for smaller items and volumes.

But the biggest barrier to people shopping online is concern over purchases turning up, and a national postal strike would plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of online shoppers at the most important time of year. That won’t be the end of the world for the big multichannel multiples, but it will be terrible news for the entrepreneurial smaller pure-play etailers that rely on Royal Mail. They deserve better from the postal workers, because they are the only ones helping build a sustainable future for the Royal Mail.

Malls due for shake-up

Yesterday’s opening of Cardiff’s new shopping centre (p40), combined with this autumn’s other openings in Aberdeen, Bath and Glasgow, is likely to mark the last flurry of shopping centre openings in the UK for a good many years. They will open with much more empty space than planned, but are good schemes in good centres and will let up as the market recovers.

But even when the market comes back, the multichannel age will mean that the next generation of shopping centres will need to be different – more leisure experience, less monolithic blocks of space where small retailers subsidise the big boys.