Igor Clark

Tesco put this shop into the retail space on the ground floor of a new apartment building near to the one in which I live. After overcoming my initial uncertainty as to whether to shop there due to their monopolistic methods and boilerplate approach simply on the presumably universal grounds that it's convenient and comparatively cheap, even if the food is frankly crap and the choice limited, I dared to ask the store manager if they would be able to get a different, additional flavour of the already obviously extremely well-selling Innocent fruit drinks in, because I like them a lot and would buy the new ones regularly.

No, he said, grimacing slightly, they wouldn't; the stock was all arranged at head office "on the computer", and the computer knew best. I implied in response that it seemed unlikely that, no matter how advanced its algorithms, said computer would know best as to whether one or possibly more real humans living in the streets surrounding a given branch were sufficiently partial to orange, carrot and mango Innocent "superfoods" smoothies that they might therefore not be giving Tesco even more money than the company was already creaming in, and he said that that was as may be, but that head office, as universal arbiter of taste and quality, decided and would continue to decide.

Finally I suggested that perhaps he might be kind enough to tell head office that a customer had asked for this particular flavour, and he informed me, his grimace converted to a smirk, that he wouldn't, because it was for me to send them an email - "on the Internet" - should I so desire.