Big Tesco is watching you

Supermarkets are planning to deploy AI to police and meddle in our diets

Artificial intelligence was the theme of the day at the Financial Times’s Future of Retail conference last week. The event, attended by 300 professionals, included talks by various CEOs and senior figures in retail, including Debenhams, Currys and Mastercard. First up to speak was Ken Murphy, CEO of Tesco. And what he had to say was scary – really scary.

Murphy talked first and foremost about how Tesco plans to use AI. Among its 300,000 staff, Tesco employs a cohort of 5,000 in IT. It takes 300 recruits in the field each year and is already building its own AI systems. Murphy was adamant that this tech would be improving the service delivered by his staff, not replacing them. On this, he was probably right.

Retailers using AI isn’t too scary in and of itself. There’s the old trope about Big Tech knowing more about you than you do, but there are certainly ways in which algorithms and targeted ads can make our lives easier. Besides, supermarkets have been tracking our habits and tastes for years now, with the aid of loyalty cards. Nevertheless, it was a bit disturbing to hear Murphy intimate that, knowing the age and gender of your children, Tesco would soon be able to give you tailored messages about the kind of future deals most relevant to them. It also curdles the stomach a bit to hear that Tesco might soon be telling us: ‘You’re throwing a lot of your food away. Why not buy one onion rather than two next week?’

Then came the bombshell. Through our mobiles and laptops, Tesco intends to send shoppers messages to the effect: ‘You’re eating too much sodium – we recommend changing your diet, and buying carrot sticks instead of crisps.’

Helpful? Maybe for some. But it is a little too intrusive for most people’s comfort. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Murphy’s speech was what it showed about Tesco’s subordination to government policy. From fighting Britain’s alleged ‘epidemic’ of obesity to strong-arming us into reducing, reusing and recycling, Tesco and other retail giants have revealed their slavish obedience to the nanny state in Whitehall.

All these initiatives by retailers faithfully reflect the character of bien pensant thinking in Britain. In July, the new Labour government committed itself to making the UK a ‘zero-waste economy’ – hence the need for supermarkets like Tesco to nudge us all into throwing away less food.

The same is true when it comes to retailers policing our diets. Since at least 2003, British state scientists have obsessed over how eating too much salt raises blood pressure and thus increases the burden on the NHS. In 2007, the New Labour government of the day fretted about our towns becoming ‘obesogenic environments’, despite an official report dismissing the idea. Now, the current Labour government wants to ban takeaway outlets near schools and forbid junk-food ads on TV after 9pm.

Retailers would contend that they are just responding to market demand with their various public-health and eco-initiatives. But this is disingenuous. Several speakers at the FT conference complained about the low profit margins UK retailing faces, the negative impact of business rates and the difficulty of making money out of recycling. So it is not the market or consumer preferences that explain the string of do-gooding manoeuvres announced at the FT bash.

As I wrote on spiked back in 2021, British retailers are becoming ‘an arm of the nanny state’, with supermarkets changing their recipes to be ‘better’ for us and nudging us into buying healthier options. But decisions about what we eat are always best made by individuals, rather than by the state, by retailers or by an AI-driven algorithm.

Unluckily for us, now that Labour is in power again, we can expect a whole lot more finger-wagging to come.