Remember when, in 17somethingorother, Napoleon described England as a nation of shopkeepers? Of course you don't, you didn't exist, and it any case he nicked the phrase from Adam Smith's 1776 magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, but the point is that the man was wrong. Unsurprising when you consider that Napoleon was wrong about lots of things, such as being really tall, invading Russia and speaking clearly on his deathbed so that those in the vicinity could make an accurate note of his comments for posterity, but in this case he was dreadfully, spectacularly wrong. Here's the hard truth: we are not a nation of shopkeepers, but a nation of shoplifters.

A survey conducted by discount vouchers peddlers VoucherCodesPro has revealed that one in five people admit to stealing items at supermarket self-service checkouts, adding up to £1.6bn worth of items every year, so frustrated are they with the ineptitude of their surrogate machine slaves. This has, naturally, been picked up by the press and featured in newspaper reports that pleasingly contain such archaic terms as pilfering (say it with me, folks: pilfering, isn't it nice?) but then again, we're threatening to prosecute people for "vagrancy" now, so why restrict our pre-industrial revolution nostalgia to language? We might as well go full-on medieval and chop these thieves' hands off. After all, £1.6bn does add up to a lot of unexpected items in a lot of bagging areas.

I should, by rights, have produced a 300-word listicle containing trite, observational humour about self-service checkouts, but disappointingly, Buzzfeed got there first. So instead I thought I'd theorise ponderously – as one Daily Mail commenter did yesterday – about capitalism's relentless ambition to "remove human endeavour from the labour process" (I have to say that the increased global visibility and access of their website is doing wonders for their comment threads).

As my colleague Stuart Heritage pointed out beautifully last weekend, we face a future wherein all technological objects will be connected in "an internet of things", and it is a connectivity that will lead to them all, eventually, conspiring to murder us. In the words of the late great Frank Zappa: "The future is scary … you think of the future. And secretly you piddle your pants." But supermarket self-checkouts are so inefficient that they wouldn't ever succeed in doing that. They'd aim for murder, of course, but they'd have to settle for temporary incandescence, enraging us as they do beyond all proportion for a mere five minutes ("leave it mate, he's not worth it") as we try to cackhandedly scan our Marks and Spencer gastro fish pies* like the chimps that we are, before giving ourselves a five-finger discount and going home. See? I can do observational too. Well, ish.

Despite coming from a long line of pillaging sheep stealers, I've never actually nicked something from a supermarket self-service checkout. I know, what a goody two shoes. I do know someone who used to do it as an impoverished student, though actually, on reflection, I'm not sure to what extent money came into it. This is someone who once stole a three-bedroom house's worth of furniture from Ikea by bypassing the checkouts but still arranged to have it all delivered by them, personally, to her door.

Then again, my innocence in respect of this particular crime probably has more to do with the fact that I rarely use self-service checkouts any more because when I do, I inevitably live to regret it. When the Sainsbury's queue fascist approaches with the intention of chivvying me into the robot pen, I simply say, politely, "No thank you", and stay put. You should all try it sometime. It not only prevents you from stealing things out of frustration, but might even save you from the gallows one day. And, if you're lucky, they might just pop you on an island somewhere and leave you to die, quietly.

* As a side note, if you buy these pies, then you're a mug. They cost £20. Twenty pounds! For a fish pie! I'm not saying you should pinch them by "forgetting to scan them" or anything, but that is silly money.