I once received, a few years ago, a voucher from Tesco at the till checkout for a free copy of the ‘Daily Mail’ the next time I shopped. Presumably this was being funded at least partly by the newspaper in question as part of a marketing strategy; perhaps Tesco was funding it partly on its own behalf having evaluated my shopping as being that of a ‘Daily Mail’ reader, who knows? If the latter their procedures obviously weren’t very accurate! In fact I mostly buy the ‘Telegraph’ or the ‘FT’ there, or indeed elsewhere; I have never bought a tabloid newspaper of any kind anywhere, ever. One of the other publications I usually buy at Tesco every month is ‘Attitude’, a gay glossy magazine; I have occasionally bought ‘Gay Times’ there, too. I’m sure some computer somewhere has registered this kind of buying pattern.

In any case, I wrote them a politely worded email through their online shopping system expressing my displeasure at being given a voucher for a free copy of such a newspaper which I categorised in the email as a ‘homophobic rag’; I think this was, and unfortunately remains, a pretty accurate description.

I’m not especially fond of Tesco, although I do a lot of my supermarket shopping there. However, credit where credit is due. I had a very nice and quite obviously personally crafted email response apologising for the offence and, more to the point, accepting that my arguments had some validity, given my particular customer profile. I have noticed in more recent times that the vouchers I receive either at the till or accompanying my regular Clubcard vouchers are usually for things I might actually want to buy. I do still have to throw away quite a lot as not being for products I have any desire to purchase, but even those are not totally outrageous. Whether it is a good thing for a company to know so much about its customers is questionnable, but I have to say I ‘trust’ the simple desire to turn a profit by a commercial organisation more than the naked desire to control our lives, for its own sake, by most governments - and particularly the present one.