I know, I’ve been here before, but I have a new angle.  Dropped in to Tesco Metro on Camden Road on the way home last night, fighting my way in, as usual, past the huge Krispy Kreme donut stand that blocks the route into the store a couple of feet back from the doorway.  And realised, not for the first time, what a dietary nightmare Tesco Metro actually is.

True, there’s a reasonable selection of fresh fruit and veg, laid out modestly in an aisle towards one end of the store.  But that’s not where it’s at, or indeed where the customers are at.  Apart from the Krispy Kremes, where the customers are at is around the huge displays of carbonated drinks, the whole aisle devoted to crisps, the cakes and buns in the large instore bakery, the takeaway pies, sausage rolls and sandwiches, the bucketloads of cheap booze and, inescapably, the long queuing track up to the checkouts which takes you past more carbonated drinks, mountains of discounted confectionery (and, to nourish the inner person, piles of slebmags fronting pics of Cheryl Cole).

Tesco, of course, knows its market very well, and I’m sure that amid all these empty calories almost all its customers find what they’re looking for.  (It’s only when a foodie twit like me turns up looking for fresh coriander and burghul that disappointment is guaranteed.)

But the thing is, Tesco picks up little or no flak for the fact that the store is single-mindedly focused on giving its customers what they want, not for a moment considering what they might need.

It’s not a trivial matter.  You see morbidly obese people staggering round the store with baskets stuffed with donuts and special offer Doritos, and you wonder whether they’ll actually make it home before they have the heart attack.  And as you get your phone out of your pocket just in case an ambulance is needed urgently, you ask yourself whether, as and when it happens, Tesco has any responsibility for the situation.

If you ask most people – if you ask Society At Large, whatever that may be – the answer is clearly “no.”  Which is funny, because if you ask the equivalent question about financial services providers and toxic financial products, the answer is clearly “yes.”

Since financial fashions change, it’s difficult to imagine exactly what would be on display in a similarly toxic financial services shop.  Some years ago, where the Krispy Kremes stand in Tesco, there’d have been a tottering tower of tech funds.  During the credit boom, there’d have been yards of cheap self-cert remortgages, and credit cards offering short interest-free periods and rates six or seven times base rate thereafter.  There’d be precipice bonds, the financial services industry’s equivalent of Haagen Dazs ice cream – a delicious short-term sense of wellbeing, followed by an anguished realisation of the long-term damage done.  And on the way to the check-out, what else but a big, bold special offer on super-sub-prime mortgages, offering the local social housing community an easy, affordable way into….medium term financial ruin.

Yes, in the same aisle where Tesco put the fresh fruit and veg, there’d be a modest selection of ISAs, Child Trust Funds, protection products and so forth.  But very few shoppers would venture into it, and most of the buyers would surely come from the comfortable middle classes.

Of course none of this could ever happen.  Unlike Tesco, the financial services industry is believed by everyone – including itself – to have a responsibility to sell to needs rather than to wants.

But where this gets a bit complicated is that as any good salesman knows, it isn’t difficult to dress up what are actually wants so that they look extraordinarily similar to needs.   During the last decade we all heard the argument, for example, that people with poor credit histories need access to the mortgage market, and so the industry is doing the right thing by providing them with appropriately risk-priced loans.   Or, back at the turn of the millennium, that retail investors need the same kind of access as institutional investors to the fastest-growing sectors of the stock market even when those sectors are populated by small, illiquid companies often listed on secondary or tertiary markets, so it’s appropriate to offer them packaged, high-cost tech funds which allow them to run risks they have no idea they’re running.

As a result, even though pretty much everyone in and around the industry would strongly agree that Tesco-style toxic tactics are totally inappropriate, the reality is that over the years our behaviour hasn’t been all that different.

It may be that as seems quite often to be the case in this country, the current rather dishonest compromise is the best available option.  Allowing the hedonist tendency to swing the pendulum the full way over towards “wants” is surely inconceivable.  But equally, putting the Calvinists in complete control and going balls-out for unmitigated needs doesn’t sound like the best idea ever, not least because it would take the remaining traces of consumer interest and enthusiasm out of an industry that desperately needs more, not less, of both.

Pondering this dilemma, one’s inclined to ask oneself what Tesco themselves would do in the circumstances.  Judging from current reports about the way they’re working behind the scenes to build up their financial services business for a major and imminent relaunch, we may be about to find out.

Remember Neil Kinnock’s spine-tingling anti-Thatcher speech?  “I warn you not to be old…I warn you not to be ill…I warn you not to be poor”?

In the somewhat unlikely event that instead of having a pop at that barmy old bat he was actually advising you on how to get a half-decent level of service out of today’s major financial services providers, then rather than age, infirmity or poverty, I think he’d be warning you mainly against being in any way odd or different.

The trouble is, the systems just can’t cope.  They can barely deal with totally straightforward vanilla transactions.  But as soon as it gets in the slightest bit tutti frutti, then it all falls over.

I could tell you all about the desperate efforts of my wife and my father-in-law to re-invest the proceeds of his maturing Santander fixed-term investment.  I won’t, because I promised long ago never to try your patience with these dull personal sagas.  I’ll say only three things.

1.  To give themselves any chance at all of a satisfactory outcome, my wife is having to make two trips from London to Swindon to visit the branch in person.

2.  The whole experience has been just as deeply frustrating for the branch staff, grappling with a hopeless computer system, than it has been for Judy and my father-in-law – in fact, Judy says, on her last trip to Swindon it was the woman in the branch trying to sort it out who was on the verge of tears, not Judy.  Or indeed her father.

3.  For all this travelling and emoting, it doesn’t look as if there will be a satisfactory option in place when the existing investment matures in a few days, and if that’s the case then my father in law says he will end a relationship, originally with Abbey National, that goes back over 60 years.

What’s at the bottom of this?  In a word, crappy old computers.   (OK, in three words.)  Two of the businesses Santander now owns, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester, were, as I recall, legendary for the complexity and antiquity of their systems.  Now they’re all being crunched together, with Bradford & Bingley thrown in for good measure, I can imagine it’s like trying to establish clear communications between three separate towers of Babel.

With jets of steam hissing from the pipework and plenty of staff digits thrust into digital dykes, the organisation can just about cope with clearing a cheque.  But as soon as you want to do anything a little bit different or complicated, well, boy, are you asking for it. We’re talking meltdown – not just of a load of 70s mainframes, but also of all human beings, staff or customers, within a 50ft radius.

What’s interesting is that as far as I know, there’s nowhere that we can check up on this.  There are lots of places, on and offline, where we can compare product features, interest rates and charges.  But I’m not aware of anyone who can tell us which institutions’ systems stand, at any moment, closest to complete collapse.

Common sense tells me that generally speaking, younger and simpler organisations will have newer computers and more fit-for-purpose software than old, complicated organisations.  (Unfairly, even though that’s generally true, they can also suffer from particularly tricky glitches:  poor old Judy, again, is dealing with one insurance company which has a clever and I think unique way of allocating individual members of staff to each customer as a personal relationship manager, which is a good and positive idea until that individual member of staff is unavailable, which for one reason or another he or she usually is.  At this point, someone else who knows nothing about your case and cares less picks up the phone and – again if you want anything remotely difficult or complicated – proceeds to screw everything up.  Once this has happened three or four times, your file has become so corrupted that it would be much, much easier to close your account and start again with a blank sheet of paper and an empty file elsewhere.)

Anyway.  Think of this not so much as a tiresome personal rant, but more as free and useful advice for anyone wanting to get one step ahead in the comparison site game.  For customers presenting with any kind of oddness or complexity, how likely is the system to fall over?   You could express the answer on the 10-point LORJTTOF scale -  Likelihoof Of Reducing Judy To Tears Of Frustration.