The government is duly keen on building Hong Kong into a smart city to stay abreast of its regional competitors. But businesses are still dragging their feet in making new investments in technology and changing old habits rooted in a monopolistic model.

Take the supermarkets. The industry of supplying Hong Kong people with their foods, groceries and other necessities is dominated by two supermarket chains that claim to have stores in almost all neighborhoods in the urban areas.

They both offer online shopping to consumers who either don’t have the time or the desire to negotiate the narrow aisles in a typical Hong Kong supermarket, racing against swarms of kamikaze shoppers with their lethal pushcarts to the cashier counter after picking up what they need. But the supermarkets’ apps are clumsy at best while offering limited payment choices, requiring the user to type in the full details of his or her credit card every time.

One supermarket chain offers online customers the convenience of using Apple Pay. But that never worked for me although I have used it to pay for food delivery multiple times.

It is often argued that online shopping can never become popular in Hong Kong because consumers can get basically all they need or want at shops located within walking distance of most homes. But that fact didn’t seem to have inhibited the growing popularity of online shopping in some other metropolitan cities, including Singapore, which is just as compact, or Shanghai.

To be sure, there is no shortage of internet merchants in Hong Kong. The larger ones have been advertising aggressively to woo customers. But none of them can remotely match the efficiency and shopping experience of Amazon or Taobao.

The return policies of most Hong Kong sites are designed to discourage buyers from doing exactly that. They require the buyers to return damaged or defective products themselves without the guarantee of replacements. At Amazon, for instance, all the buyer needs to do is to email a completed form, and someone will deliver the replacement, usually on the following day.

There is no use just talking about building a smart city. To make it happen, someone will have to invest in the infrastructure of excellent service. So far, only Uber and a handful of foreign-owned service providers are willing to do that.