The doorstep is lonelier than before. Where encyclopedia salesmen, “consultants” offering lipstick, and sellers of utilities jostled, there are fewer cold callers. Without package couriers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are not paid on commission in the usual sense, there might be solitude.

Doorstep selling is so beleaguered in some countries that the crisis at Provident Financial, the UK subprime lender that tried to shrink its network of agents and found that business promptly fell apart, has a cheering quality. “That will disappear in the brave new world,” Peter Crook, former chief executive, promised in February. Instead it was he who disappeared from the helm.

It turned out that Mr Crook was foolhardy, dazzled by a vision of commission-based agents who offered and retrieved loans to the lower-paid being replaced by staff carrying computers. Without the self-employed sellers of the “Provvy” calling regularly, customers ceased being reminded to repay and collection rates plunged. There is something to the human touch.