Sir – This week I had occasion to use a small branch of a major supermarket in Oxford.

At 8am, there were no tills open with personal service, only the unreliable ‘self-service’ tills with long queues. I left and found a more obliging shop.

Presumably this is a cost-cutting measure. It is much cheaper to get the customers to operate the machines themselves than to employ people to serve them. As long as the money keeps rolling in they have no interest in who provides this money.

I know I am not alone in feeling that my right to choose has been removed. There are a lot of people who resent being mechanised.

We prefer to speak to a real live human being. If there is a query, it can be solved very quickly by a conversation, rather than receiving repeated unhelpful instructions from a tinned voice.

I hope that the company’s financial advisers have factored in the cost of the loss of custom from people like us who will not accept being treated like machines.

Louise Williams, Headington