We are supposed to feel grateful to our newsagents and banks for compromising their standards of service

At the machines are terrified tourists and at least one person having a stroke from the stress

Illustration by Ping Zhu

January appears to have become enshrined as Retail Month, when people send or take back the presents they were given and get the things they really wanted instead. We are still "tracking" a couple of items we bought online in the final, terrible days before Yuletide, but which never arrived. Somewhere in postal purgatory lies a jiffy bag containing a DVD box set of Last Tango In Halifax, a present now without a point, as we had to buy something else to replace it at the last moment. For this the tall blonde woman had to go to a "shop", one of those old-fashioned buildingy things you used to find on the "high street". But shops aren't what they used to be either. Many of them are new and improved and therefore even worse than before.

For instance, I occasionally go into WH Smith in one of the mainline railway stations to buy a newspaper or a competitively priced bag of Revels. They used to have four or five tills and a queueing system, which meant you were usually in and out of the shop in a couple of minutes. Sometime last year they ripped all this out and replaced it with eight self-service machines and one till, which is the only place from which you can buy cigarettes. This means there is always a queue of half a dozen people for the one till, some of whom are buying gaspers with bags of change or out-of-date credit cards, and all of whom will miss their train.

At the machines are terrified Belgian tourists, old people panicking, someone (usually me) who has put the wrong money into the wrong slot in the wrong machine, and at least one person lying on the floor having a stroke from the stress of it all. And in the middle there's one WH Smith employee, herself so stressed and miserable that she is planning to give in her notice at the end of the day. The money saved by sacking the till workers has no doubt done wonders for the share price and senior executives' emolument packages, but regular customers now buy their papers elsewhere.

At my bank, which is light blue in its colour scheme and occasionally light- fingered in its dealings, something similar has occurred. Gone are the old, low-tech counters, with expensive people sitting behind them. Now there's just one counter, with a queue of angry customers waiting, while a tiny man with a wispy beard tries to persuade everyone to use the machines. But in the age of internet banking, why go to a bank unless you need to talk to someone? Not all problems can be solved by screens and buttons. So the machines remain unused and the queue grows longer and longer. "I see Lloyds still have counters", said the women behind me the other day. If they keep them, they'll soon have all the customers as well.

I think the idea is that we are supposed to be impressed by the machines, and to feel grateful to our newsagents and banks for compromising their standards of service to look cool and technologically advanced. The mistake we make is to assume that the people who made these decisions were malevolent, rather than just half-witted and useless. Of course the machines are pretty useless themselves, always going wrong and screaming "unidentified item in the bagging area!" at passers-by. It's a sort of brotherhood between man and machine, a shared incompetence. Only unemployment can change these men's minds, and only machetes can change the machines'.