Your starter for 10: what do more than 90% of us do now that we never did 20 years ago?
And a supplementary: what does Sting have to do with how the average high street looks today?
The answer to both lies in the game-changer that is e-commerce.
According to Shop Direct, the group behind major online retailers such as Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com, more than nine-in-10 of us have shopped online since the first secure transaction was made 20 years ago this week.
And that’s right, the first item ever to be bought securely over the internet was the Sting album Ten Summoner’s Tales a snip at $12.48 plus shipping.
In the two decades since, e-commerce has gone from nothing to a global phenomenon.
It has changed the way every single one of us procures goods and services, vastly increased consumer choice and built in convenience.
No longer is the customer constrained by a store’s physical opening hours. Shopping is now at the fingertips of everyone at any time of the day or night.
And boy have we embraced this new window of opportunity for a little retail therapy.
More than one-in-four of us buys something online each week, with cyber purchases in the UK adding up to an astonishing £91 billion last year.
For the major retailers the rise of e-commerce has given headaches and opportunities alike.
In the early days it was seen by some as nothing more than a passing fad, and efforts to court the online audience were often cursory at best.
That complacency led to new players entering the market more fleet of foot players at that (think Amazon), with lower overheads and ambitions above their station and the biggest change on the high street since the invention of the department store was off and rolling.
Twenty years after Sting’s album was mailed off to its new owner, there is no serious retailer globally who doesn’t have a mature online strategy.
E-commerce has been a revolution but it is one that is not over yet.
It’s difficult to imagine what the retail landscape will look like in another 20 years.
* While I’m on a digital theme, I was delighted to see Dundee’s reputation as a mecca for the computer games industry enhanced yet again this week.
From the DMA Design days of the early 1990s when Dave Jones and Mike Dailly produced their worldwide hit Lemmings a game that was distributed on cassette tape and floppy disk such was the technology of the time the city has punched well above its weight in a sector where standing still is not an option.
There have been notable successes the Grand Theft Auto franchise also started out on its journey to global domination at DMA and notable failures such as the demise of VIS and Realtime Worlds.
But both in the good and the bad times, the city’s support for this most interesting of creative industries has been unwavering.
That was evident over the weekend as thousands of fans flocked to City Square for Dare Protoplay, a four-day festival designed to showcase the best in independent games development.
It is easy to dismiss Dare as a sideshow for people who have spent years in their bedrooms and have trouble coping with daylight. But anyone who actually ventured inside the Dare marquee would know that to be utter bunkum.
Computers, tablets, smartphones and their myriad applications are not just the present of the global economy, they are the future.
And the incredibly talented pool of computer coders, designers, modellers, illustrators, technicians and testers that we have at our disposal means Dundee is at the vanguard of an industry that will only become more important.
Abertay University, the organiser of Dare, has to get a special mention here.
As an institution it was an early convert to the digital revolution, and its enthusiasm for the subject and the economic opportunities it could afford its students has been a significant factor in the city’s success.
It has fostered talent, honed skills and provided a supportive environment for young start-up companies to test out ideas and develop business plans.
It is fully deserving of all the praise that comes its way.