I took the plunge at the supermarket recently and tried out its new scan-as-you-go system. The hand-held scanners are placed on a sort of gun-rack at the entrance, where you flash your clubcard and one of the weapons lights up. You take this and away you go, zapping all before you. It feels good: a bit like pressing the pedestrian button on a Dublin traffic light, except that this one actually works.
I could use the price gun because, for once, I didn't have the children with me. Had they been along, this exciting new toy might have distracted them while I chose the wholesome cereal rather than the one with the prefix "choco" and a free piece of junk. On the other hand, they would also have seized control of the scanning operation and then there would have been the inevitable rows over who got to zap the cereal box. Cue the gunfight at the Special K corral.
I would have suggested they zap alternately, a system that could work if closely supervised. Unfortunately, I need all my concentration in the supermarket for identifying potential trouble spots - such as sweet displays - and accelerating past them while pointing the other way and saying: "Oh look - an elephant!" No. There would have been nothing for it but to get two guns, price everything twice and then get the store manager to halve the bill.
In the children's absence, none of this was necessary. I proceeded calmly to the check-out and handed in my gun for the ballistics check. Instead of which, the woman just asked me if I had anything to declare (ie, items that didn't scan). Then she deactivated the gun and I paid her.
Other supermarkets weigh the trolley. Some of them may even weigh the customer to check that he hasn't eaten his way around the store. But mine works on the presumption of honesty, apart - the assistant said - from checking one in 10 trolleys.
The trust was no less touching for the fact that it took the company much longer to introduce the system to our area than to posher neighbourhoods, where customers had reputations to lose. Of course, my supermarket is also unusual in continuing to allow customers to weigh their own fruit and vegetables. Most stores now weigh at the check-out, presumably because of customer fraud. But outright fraud apart, the weigh-it-yourself scales is a haven of moral relativism. After all, without some horticultural expertise, how are you supposed to tell the more expensive "vine tomatoes" from the ordinary ones (do they not all grow on vines?). And what exactly constitutes a "gourmet mushroom"? I myself have eaten the odd grape without weighing it first and presenting the barcode sticker at the till. My reasoning is that if it tastes good, I'll buy a bunch and the shop will profit: it's a small-scale version of the man from Del Monte saying yes.
But this scan-as-you go thing seems a bigger fraud risk. A customer might accidentally-on-purpose forget to scan an item or two, and these just might be the more expensive items. When the "mistake" is exposed, he could just put his hands up and say: "OK, which of you kids forgot to scan the €17 organic chicken?" Maybe there's covert surveillance too, like they have in Las Vegas casinos to identify gamblers who are winning more than they should. Maybe if you acquired a reputation for forgetfulness, your loyalty card would henceforth activate more than the price gun, alerting security staff to your arrival. Maybe I'm paranoid.
On the other hand, supermarkets already know a scary amount about you, thanks to the loyalty card. I read in the Financial Times that Tesco - or the company that manages its clubcard system - now has the biggest database of personal information in Britain. It doesn't keep files the way a doctor would. But it knows if you have a new baby, for example; it knows if you have older kids who sometimes persuade you to buy chocolate cereals; and it knows when you're worried enough about factory-farmed chicken that you'll shell out for the expensive organic version.
At its simplest, the system allows you to be targeted by money-off coupons or strategic placement of products that your profile suggests you should be interested in. But it goes much further than that. Although Tesco's "data-miners" don't pass on personal information, their sample is so big and the extrapolation of intelligence so sophisticated that they can charge suppliers £50,000 sterling a year for access.
My own supermarket may not be as sophisticated as that, but it's not stupid either. Touched as I was by its trust the other day, I couldn't help noticing that the shop is devolving to me more and more of the jobs for which it used to pay staff.
While I was still congratulating myself for having scanned as I went, the assistant helpfully suggested that in future, to save time, I should pack as I go too.
Like all supermarkets, mine has also devolved the job of recycling all the unnecessary packaging on its goods. It's not the worst offender in this regard (that would be Marks & Spencer). Even so, I note with interest that the UK's environment minister has encouraged British shoppers to shed excess packaging at the check-outs. I don't know if I'm brave enough to take such a stand here. But on future shopping trips, in the new spirit of customer-empowerment, I might just discard-as-I-go too.