Working from home: Is this the future?

New York

WORKING from home once meant cutting yourself off from almost all the resources of the office. As a result, people with office jobs seldom did it. The rise of home computers and email began to change that in the 1990s. As at 1995, a Gallup poll found that 9 per cent of Americans had ever telecommuted ("that is, worked from home using a computer to communicate for your job"). When they were asked again in 2006, that had jumped to 32 per cent; in 2015, it was 37 per cent.

Most of those people reported working from home only a few days a month, which is what I do. But the percentage of American workers toiling primarily from home has been rising too (if far less less rapidly), according to the Census Bureau. Shopping from home has a much longer history: Americans were buying clothing, guns, bugles and other essentials (even houses!) out of mail-order catalogues long before there were malls to go to. But the rise of online retailing has occasioned a big shift in retail sales towards what the government calls "non-store retailers", which is mostly e-commerce. Non-store retailing's growth has actually acc…