Going on holiday always alters your perspective, whether it’s making you determined to find a new equilibrium in the work/life balance, planning a sunny retirement on foreign shores (now much more difficult, thanks to Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving), or finally taking the plunge and start that fitness regime you have been promising yourself all year.

I was lucky enough to get away for nearly three weeks this year, enough time to seriously consider all of these ideas, and many more.  I had hoped that after such a long time away some things here at home would have changed: the A11 roadworks would finally be finished perhaps, or Norwich would be above Ipswich in the Championship.  But no, everything seemed the same.

Everything, that is, until I first went food shopping.  When I got to the checkout at my local supermarket, I became aware that something was radically different.  Instead of a line of proper tills, with a few self-checkout machines at one end, the robots had proliferated during my brief absence.  Now, fully three-quarters of the space was taken up with the hated automatic tills; just four checkouts with humans remained – and one of those was closed.

When these self-operated tills first appeared, I think most of them viewed them as a harmless fad.  Somewhere you could use if you just had a couple of items to buy, certainly no more than a basketful.

But now the tipping point has arrived.  These things are now in the majority, and unless we fight back, I fear that tills operated by human beings will disappear altogether.

I know that replacing human beings with machines is cheaper, and therefore boosts the profits of our already-wealthy supermarkets, but at what cost to us, the customers?  The tech-savvy may find doing it for themselves easy (although even then, not if you have a trolley-load of groceries), but there are plenty of older people, and those who have not grown up with technology, for whom automation can be baffling and excluding.

On Saturday, most of the automated tills stood unused, as a steadily growing queue of shoppers voted with their feet and opted to wait to be served by a human being.  In desperation, staff started trying to persuade some of them to use the self checkouts.  Most refused; one lady was only persuaded when the staff member said she would put her groceries through the automatic till for her – which rather negates the whole point, doesn’t it?

During lockdown, the only people I spoke to face-to-face apart from my wife for a six month period were those selling me food.  They became friends, a social safety-net which warded off loneliness and isolation.  And now we are throwing these same people on the scrapheap, to further line the already bulging pockets of the supermarkets’ shareholders.

As it happens, my local supermarket is Waitrose. This is a shop where pretty much everything you buy is more expensive than in other supermarkets.  Its customers understand and accept this.  It’s a trade-off: higher prices in exchange for a pleasant shopping experience, based on knowledgeable, well-trained and likeable people.  Remove the human element, and there is no benefit going there anymore.  You might as well shop at a discount store, or order everything online.

Of course, the accountants who run these places think only of the profits.  They cannot – or will not – understand that those very profits are based on their customers being loyal and coming back - not being profit centres, useful only to be fleeced of their hard-earned cash.  And that their staff are not expensive and expendable cost centres, but human beings without whom their businesses are nothing.

Despite what you might think, I am an avid user of technology, and can see the value that it can bring society.  But if you view it only as an excuse to cut costs and remove human beings from the customer journey, then you are not using technology, you are being a slave to it, and that is something completely different.

So to those supermarkets who think they can do away with human customer service and replace it with machines, let me say this: I will not spend my money with you, and I refuse to put up with inferior service just to line your shareholders’ pockets.  By all means use technology to make my life easier, more convenient, better value; but never forget that the aphorism ‘people buy people’ is only a cliché because it is fundamentally true.