The problem with self-checkout tills

Our national malaise arises in part from the poor state of many of Britain’s private services. No, not a misprint. I mean private services. Many on the political right berate public services, implying that were they only to be privatised everything would be sweetness and light. Yet modern technology now makes it all too easy for companies to treat their customers with just as much high-handed disdain and bureaucratic inflexibility as any state enterprise.

Drive into a pub car park and forget to record your number plate and you’ll receive a fine of £100. Contesting this requires several hours of your time trying to find a receipt to prove you bought a drink.

Or consider the technological hoops you negotiate to read a utility bill, cancel a credit-card subscription or locate an ‘unidentified object in the bagging area’. New technology has offloaded work that was once performed by workers on to hapless customers. Soon we may need a four-day working week just to spend our Fridays changing our mobile phone tariff or updating 17 parking apps when our credit card expires. This nonsense needs to be curbed by legislation.

When a right-wing capitalist like me, working in marketing, is calling for greater consumer protection, things have probably reached a crisis point. But why? Until this century, most transactions were conducted face-to-face. Such transactions are lubricated by a high degree of tacit trust and shame avoidance. By contrast, any online exchange must be designed to be proof against the world’s most dishonest people. This imposes a huge burden on the majority of honest customers.

But the wider problem is caused by the tech-financial-consulting complex, which has sold the management of large businesses on the nerd-god of perfect quantification: the idea that every penny of a company’s outgoings must be justifiable in terms of immediate savings or instantly measurable gains.