For the Queen, it was a step into the unknown. Well, unknown to Her Majesty perhaps but now all too familiar to the rest of us the self-service checkout area of a supermarket. “You can’t cheat then?” she asked when Damien Corcoran, a regional manager for Sainsbury’s stores in the Northeast, showed her how to use one of the firm’s now ubiquitous automated tills. The 93-year-old monarch was visiting a pop-up Sainsbury’s in Covent Garden, central London, last week and, having never done the weekly shop, it must have been an eye-opener. To the rest of us, the onward march of the “Dalek checkouts” has been going on since the late 1990s.

Flying easyJet? Then you will be doing the bag drop yourself, weighing the luggage and attaching the label before sending your suitcase into obscurity.

Going to the supermarket, chemist or DIY store? There used to be someone on the checkout who would smile, say hello and perhaps even chat. No longer – now you go to a faceless machine. And there you effectively do the job of someone – since made unemployed – who once worked on the old-fashioned manned checkouts, scanning barcodes, packing bags and taking your money.

As if the automated tills were not frustrating enough, Marks & Spencer is facing a flood of complaints after using Britain’s Got Talent stars Amanda Holden, Alesha Dixon and Ant and Dec to provide the voices for its checkouts.

Using them was part of the store’s BGT sponsorship and ends on June 3, thankfully, but it was enough for one shopper to describe the experience of being hectored by Holden as “the worst day of his life”. Another shopper tweeted: “Weirdest thing ever going to self-service in M&S and hearing Alesha piping up at you.”

As with all technology, it is a long way short of flawless, with the machine asking questions about loyalty cards, numbers of bags used, requesting staff approval for items such as alcohol, painkillers and even safety razors.

But beneath the daily irritations lies a more profound problem: the sense of alienation and loneliness that automation brings in all walks of life.

The companies may love them because of the savings in staff wages but to many it is another step away from human contact.

The Campaign to End Loneliness has warned of an estimated 1.2 million people in the UK who have “chronic” loneliness.

The charity has highlighted that automated checkouts have reduced what might have been some people’s only chance to speak to someone during the day. Another charity, Anchor, found about a quarter of older people were put off from going shopping by automated checkouts which seemed “intimidating” and “unfriendly”. Older people enjoyed the interaction with the person at the till and without that shopping was a “miserable experience”.

The British Retail Consortium has warned that automated checkouts could add to loneliness and isolation among the elderly.

“There was a time when people knew their shopkeepers and could pass the time of day. You can’t do that with a machine,” a spokesman said.

A report for Anchor produced by the Centre for Future Studies consultancy group said 24 per cent of older people were deterred from shopping by automated checkouts.They believed people would feel under pressure “if they don’t respond quickly enough” to the instructions on the machine. It also might mean “they can have gone shopping without having said “Hello” to a single person, and that’s a miserable experience”.

It also has an impact on declining sales in the High Street. If older people don’t feel welcome because everything is automated, why go there? And if people don’t go then the High Street continues on its steady decline with shop closures and empty stores.

The companies which use automation claim the automated checkouts make shopping “cashierless, frictionless and seamless”.Which is not great if you are one of the staff who is out of a job, replaced by a machine.

One report in 2014 found that 93 per cent of people disliked the new checkouts and that they even drove some shoppers to theft.

But there is a subtle psychology at work here as well. Journalist and BBC broadcaster Jenni Murray timed how long it took to buy the same items at both staffed and self-service tills in eight major shops. In every instance, the staff-run checkout was faster.

But the shopping psychologists have worked out that thanks to a phenomenon known as “wait warping” when you’re more actively involved in the transaction, it appears to progress more quickly. Even if doesn’t.

But there is another worrying aspect. As with everything on a computer, it is recorded.

And then when you pay with a card there is a data file recording what you bought. Of course, that is true of the normal checkout as well, but the more our lives are monitored and controlled by machines the less privacy we have. Not everyone feels negative about automation. There is a generational element to it, with younger people to whom technology is second nature, often welcoming it.

Harriet Williamson, 27, shopping in Hammersmith, west London, said: “I love the automated checkouts. I like that I don’t have to talk to anyone.There is usually not a queue and they are quick.

“I feel more in control of the situation. OK, it’s irritating when you have to get approval, but I am not ashamed of my buying choices, so it doesn’t worry me.”

Meanwhile, a pensioner shopping in Petts Wood, Kent, said she found automated checkouts annoying. “It’s not about the fact you don’t talk to anyone, as you talk to people all the time as the machines never work. “You are constantly being told you have done something wrong but it is impossible to work out what it is. So you stand there waiting for a staff member to turn up and thinking it would have been better to go to the ordinary checkout in the first place.”

That may be something the Queen never experiences for herself.

And last week the machines got it right. There was an unexpected item in the bagging area.The Queen. But will she ever be back?

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