Why the Post Office School of Management is now the rule, not the exception.

I don't enjoy driving.

I live within walking distance of about nine supermarkets.

I walk with a trolley to my local Sainsbury's and there I do the family shop.

Over the last couple of years, they have introduced self-service checkouts.

But I'm a bolshie shopper, so if the checkout is closed, I ask an assistant to open it up.

Last Saturday morning, the assistant looked at the amount of shopping in my trolley and grudgingly agreed to open up the checkout lane.

I said to her it was insane to do this. There is a large elderly population in Bournemouth. They hate self-checkout.

For about the tenth time, I explained we like Sainsbury's, my parents always shopped there, but if they don't open a till, especially at peak times, I will go to another supermarket that does.

The shop assistant said, we agree with you. We keep telling the manager.

When I completed my shop, the assistant said, shall I call the manager?

The manager came down, "I'm so glad you've said this: you're the ninth person to complain this morning.

Please will you complain to the helpline, because they don't listen to us."

I said I would.

Though I pointed out that I'd tried to complain before, but the call-centre procedure was excessively complicated, the email didn't work and there was no address to send letters.

I got back home and I did navigate the complex and challenging call-centre tree.

The guy on the other end of the phone was chilling on a Saturday afternoon.

He listened to my comments and told me that he would pass them on. There was no offer of any other follow-up.

Then I thought about it.

While in the 1980s the mantra may have been about serving the customer, that time has passed.

We're now in the era of authoritarian capitalism.

The manager told me the plan was to turn the store into a Smart Shopping outlet with no manned checkouts.

The vision for this Sainsbury's, which has been on the site for over a century, is to create a bricks-and-mortar walk-in vending machine, not a human marketplace.

The local stores generate very small amounts of profit. And the money is made competing on price, not on service.

Nobody cares.

Human beings are troublesome, unpredictable and time-consuming, the more you can cut them out of the system, the more profit you can make.

If I'm upset about this, I should shop somewhere else, and the people working at Sainsbury's should look for another job.

Modern businesses are not running social clubs, they're maintaining a technology infrastructure.

Complex human needs can't be allowed to get in the way of competitive prices.

In 2019, there already was an attempt to merge Sainsbury's and Asda, which was rejected by the UK competition watchdog.

If Sainsbury's and Asda really cared about their own distinct brand values, the idea of a merger would be an anathema.

I watched the story of the Post Office scandal and I saw Paula Vennells on the TV.

I thought why didn't she go to the branches?

Did she ever go behind the screens and take a seat and talk to her postmasters?

The answer was of course not.

Top management will be studying data, not people.

The problem is that when you take the relationships out of a company, there is nothing left.

No real commitment from the employees or the customers.

When, as management, you start being selective about the human needs you want to meet, you risk clouding your judgement.

You begin to make some really dumb decisions because you have to ride roughshod over human problems, as Paula Vennels did to her cost.

(Coincidentally, I've been watching Adam Curtis's series TraumaZone about the collapse of Communism. It's curious to note that the system fell apart because they were running it by responding to data, not human beings.)

I had the same feeling when I was at the political hustings during the General Election.

There was a Reform Party supporter who asked a question about immigration.

He took umbrage at the responses of the Labour, Conservative and LibDem candidates.

He said, "You call me a hater, but I care about my country."

There were jeers at him.

The mainstream politicians, of course, have the data.

They know public services would collapse without immigration, so they belittle his concerns.

Likewise, the Sainsbury's managers haven't got the bandwidth to worry about eccentric customers in Dorset.

Their response would be we hear you, but why don't just drive a car to the out-of-town superstore like everyone else?

It's not difficult to see why the Post Office scandal hit such a raw nerve.

Everywhere we're being asked to repress our irrational emotions, because there are more important processes than us going on.

Processes that we have to respect to maintain our precious economic and political stability.

But 'authoritarian capitalism' is an oxymoron.

It's going to be intriguing to watch how this tension unfolds in the coming months and years.