Full of admiration though I am for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his efforts to persuade supermarkets to do more to improve welfare standards for chickens, I am beginning to feel he might be better off directing his energies at another area where they are letting standards slip.

I refer, of course, to the introduction of those self-serve tills at supermarkets which appear to have been fiendishly designed to maximise the amount of time customers have to wait to get out of the shop by repeatedly telling you that there is an “unexpected item in the bagging area”, a phrase which has now replaced “your call is really important to us” and “ we can offer you a loan” as among life’s greatest irritants.

I would dearly love to know the creative thinking behind these self-service tills. Look, great idea here. We know people hate queuing, so we’ll introduce something that will, er, make them wait even longer! And we’ll put all the buttons in hard-to-find places.

Yes, but will it mean we can make do with less cashiers and save money?

No, you’ll have to redeploy them to act as anger-management counsellors. Oh, and you’ll have to reprogramme them all so they don’t automatically say ‘are you all right with the packing today?’

Actually, you rarely see that many staff around these tills and you can understand why.

Although I don’t consider myself a confrontational sort of person, that robotic voice has on occasion pushed me close to Andy Murray-style howls of desperation if not random acts of violence.

The paradox is that this is a technological advance that has probably made the average customer experience worse than it was before.

And to be frank, if a supermarket giant is going to make me wait even longer to process 15 items or less while I listen to their in-house radio station telling me there are bargains galore on the produce counter, then the least I expect is someone to stuff it into bags for me.