Long life | 6 October 2016

In olden days, before the internet arrived, shopping was quite simple. You’d go into a shop and buy something, and that was it. If you liked the shop, if it sold things you wanted to buy at a fair price, and if the shopkeeper was efficient and agreeable, you might return. But otherwise you wouldn’t. The shopkeeper might hope for your custom, but there wasn’t much else he could do about it. The customer was not only always right, as tradition dictated, but was also left in peace.

How different things are today. The customer is constantly harassed. Anyone who has ever bought anything on the internet has had his name and his transaction publicised all over cyberspace. He is a sitting duck, ready to be approached for custom by any company in the world. For the rest of his life, and probably for long afterwards, his email inbox will be clogged with sale catalogues.

But even more annoying than straightforward salesmanship is the more oblique approach. There is, for example, Amazon’s claim to know what your tastes are. If you buy a cushion, it will conclude that you are interested in soft furnishings, and send you a list of other things you ‘might like’ such as sofas and armchairs; if you buy a machete, it might decide that murdering people is your hobby and therefore recommend an additional purchase of a gun, a chainsaw, or a noose.

But the most irritating thing of all is the way that companies, having taken your money, demand your feedback. I use a London taxi service that follows up every journey with a text message asking me to rate the driver’s performance. It says this will help it to improve its service to customers, but it feels more like asking me to act as a school sneak and to collude in getting somebody disciplined or fired.