The first supermarket I can remember was in Radlett. I think it was a Bejam, but I can’t be sure, and it certainly isn’t there any more.

But it sticks in my memory for one thing above all else – the vast numbers of cardboard boxes at the checkout.

A few decades ago, there was a rather fabulous system of unprompted recycling. Companies would sell a thousand bunches of bananas to a supermarket and they’d come delivered in brown boxes.

Then they’d be unpacked, the bananas would go on the shelves and the boxes would be lobbed into a special area near the tills.

Then you'd buy your shopping, grab a cardboard box, fill it with your stuff, and go home.

No plastic bags, you understand. You really would see people wobbling off to their car with a box of shopping, possibly supplemented by their very own wheeled shopping basket. This was the era when people were issued with tartan shopping trolleys as soon as they got to retirement age.

And you really would go to different places for different things. Milk came from the milkman, along with orange juice that came in milk bottles (an absolute personal favourite of mine), fruit and veg from the greengrocer (the supermarket fruit wasn’t too good), bread from the baker, meat from the butcher and fish from the fishmonger.

Of course you can still do all those things – other than the juice in a milk bottle, which I haven’t seen for a long time.

But most of us don’t. Sure you might go to the butcher, but not as a matter of habit. Greengrocers are few and far between these days. Bakers have become coffee and sandwich shops. The number of milkmen has fallen markedly.

But does it matter? We can bemoan change, of course, because that’s what British people like to do, and change as profound as the slow demise of the traditional high street is not something to take lightly.

But we are almost all complicit – supermarkets are taking over the world, and just about all of us have signed up to helping them do it.

Our supermarket chains are growing remorselessly and doing all our thinking for us. And while that might sound like the precursor to a tirade against big shops, it’s not. I’m not anti-supermarkets. I’m intrigued by them.

Tesco is the biggest in this country. Thirty per cent of the market, and worth billions of pounds. You could probably live a pretty normal life while spending every penny with Tesco and never leaving your house.

Groceries delivered, banking, insurance, holidays, a credit card, toys, a mobile phone, towels, tools. It may not be the most exciting way to live your life, but you could do it.

Ponder that for a moment. A few decades ago you might have visited five different shops to do your daily shop; now you could theoretically live your life by using one website.

Is that better? Well, plenty of people pine for the old days, with the personal touch and variety of stores. I’m not so sure. The retail world has changed because of computers, better transport links and bigger companies.

You can’t go back. The old high street has gone forever and it won’t come back.

It isn’t just Tesco, of course. Sainsbury’s and Asda do much the same. Go to the Dome roundabout and you can get all of life’s essentials, as well as plenty of stuff that isn’t remotely essential. And the services they offer . . .

Many years ago I once had to send a fax– yup, a fax – ask your parents, kids – at 11pm.

The exact circumstances involved either buying or selling a house, or possibly both at the same time, but the fax was the final crucial part.

We owned a rather large machine that was a combined phone and fax. It hadn’t been used for a while, thanks to the rise of email killing fax machines almost stone dead, and it was sitting unloved in a box, but it was there for moments like this. For the one time you need to send a fax.

So I dialled the number, pressed the on button, waited for the machine to start whirring, and then watched in some horror as smoke started coming out of the side.

I flipped open the machine and saw a small fire starting. My spiteful, horrid, outmoded fax machine had committed hara kiri at the crucial moment, purely to spite me.

So what do you do at 11pm when you need to send a fax? First you panic and complain that the world’s unfair. Then you wonder who on earth even owns a fax machine any more. Then you think about which businesses are still up and running at this time of night and drive to the Dome roundabout ready to beg. And glory be, the manager of Asda not only had a fax machine, but let me use it for free. These days, there’s a lot more than just kindly managers sending signed and singed documents. Asda is enormous, and ringed with that curious arcade of small little shops round the edge.

The new super-duper Tesco, the subject of national attention from the many people who scrutinise every movement in the world of British retail, is more of an all-in experience. There’s a coffee shop, a Giraffe restaurant, distinctive areas for clothing, fruit and myriad other bits. The trick is to make you feel like you’ve left Tesco, even though you never have.

There was never a coffee shop in Bejam, if that’s what it was (please someone – let me know), and far less one a coffee shop with a kooky sounding name as you get in Tesco Watford now. But they’ve done their research and the coffee shop is packed.

So is the store. We like to complain about the steamroller power of supermarkets, but they’re always busy, online traffic is growing hugely and competition keeps prices low.

The retail landscape has changed and our shopping habits have changed with it.

If we didn’t want huge supermarkets with coffee shops and clothes and the ability to provide for everything you need – if there was no demand for such shopping megaliths – then we wouldn't have them.

We might complain about them, but be sure – we made them.