Customers will weigh up the cost of delivery charges against the benefits, says Steve Robinson

The recent news that Charles Kennedy was to defect from the Lib Dems to Labour was described by him as being the silliest of August silly season stories.

So it was with an air of caution that I read last week that Tesco is going to charge customers to pick up their shopping from stores themselves instead of having it delivered.

Of course the marketeers - and indeed the press office - won’t describe it in such blunt terms as I have, but it seems customers will increasingly have to pay for convenience and probably will.

I recently paid for speedy boarding for an easyJet flight only to find myself comedy speed walking on the tarmac with all the other speedy boarders to get a seat with extra legroom.

The problem with convenience is that it costs. It’s expensive for Asos to deliver same-day inside the M25 and so it passes the cost on. Tesco is picking the shopping for you so why shouldn’t it charge?

The issue is that customers aren’t trained in Kai-Zen and don’t analyse the costs associated with an activity - they just see the end result and will weigh the charge up against that.

It’s why third party pick-up points have taken a while to catch on. Customers see the act of picking stuff up, convenient as it is, as something they have invested effort into.

As such why should they pay?

If they don’t pay then the retailer has to foot the bill and therefore pick-up points will only really be feasible for those retailers with sufficient cash margins to absorb the costs and still make a profit.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that the rules of the real world still apply to the virtual world. You have to make money or you will eventually run out of money - although I recently saw a TV ad for a company that is an aggregator of free-play vouchers from bingo websites.

Another rule is that if there’s a loophole for customers to exploit they will find it - only in the virtual world they will probably discover it more quickly and share it even faster still.

We have all received an email from friends saying you can by a TV from Acme.com for £1 because of a pricing error only to be disappointed when the order isn’t fulfilled. Well, perhaps before I knew a bit about consumer law.

But the most concerning parallel in the virtual world is that there are criminals out there waiting to rob you around every corner. This came to light recently when police in Finland investigated the theft of significant amounts of virtual furniture from 400 users of the Habbo virtual hotel.

Hoax web pages were used to steal names and passwords which were used to sign in to Habbo profiles and take property. Police searched homes, confiscated computers and questioned several people. The furniture was never recovered.

Steve Robinson is chief executive of M and M Direct