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A L S O__T O D A Y Getting to know all about you By Jennifer Vogel Attention, shoppers -- what you tell supermarket clubs may be used against you 21st Log Congress' roster of hypocrisy - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K HotWired, R.I.P.? Discuss the uncertain future of the once-leading online media company in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The joy of Perl By Andrew Leonard How Larry Wall invented a messy programming language -- and changed the face of the Web (10/13/98) Typing for nonconformists By Alex Marshall The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand (10/12/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? Copyright suit pits newspapers against conservative site (10/09/98) The games people play By Greg Lindsay Myst and Riven are a dead end. The future of computer gaming lies in online, multiplayer worlds (10/08/98) Wired acquired By Janelle Brown Lycos gobbles up the pieces of Wired's online empire. Is the revolution over? (10/07/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

_______Service with an artificial smile SUPERMARKET CLUBS POINT THE WAY TO A FUTURE OF CORPORATE-MANDATED FRIENDLINESS AND STEPFORD CLERKS. _______- - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY ROBERT ROSSNEY These days, when I buy groceries at my local Safeway, I hand my Safeway card to the clerk, who passes it over the bar-code scanner. There's a beep, and his eyes light on his screen. Then he looks away from the screen to me. He meets my eye. He smiles. "How are you doing today, Mr. Rossney?" he asks. This all started innocuously enough, with the beginnings of personalized mass mailings in the 1970s ("Mr. ROSSNEY, you may already have won!"), when marketers discovered that they could use computers to exploit Dale Carnegie's trick of always calling the customer by name on a large scale. Today everybody with something to sell, from Web sites and catalog vendors to retail stores and stockbrokers, starts by compiling a database about the prospects. The bigger the enterprise, it seems, the friendlier it tries to be. And really big enterprises have the computing horsepower to be maybe a little friendlier than I would like. As my new friend at Safeway speaks, the supermarket's computer is analyzing my purchases. It discovers that I bought a certain brand of kitty litter. Aha, it thinks. And a thermal printer on the check stand is already spitting out a coupon good for 50 cents off a competing brand of kitty litter. There is something vaguely sinister about this coupon. Safeway, I sense, thinks that I'm making a mistake. It is correcting my mistake very politely, so politely that the word "mistake" never comes up. Here's 50 cents off next time you buy kitty litter. And oh, by the way, buy the right kind next time, will you? Thanks. This whole exchange is supposed to make me feel good about shopping at Safeway. They're friendly to me. They offer me bargains. They care about my needs. They are crafting a shopping experience that is customized to my personal requirements. Maybe I'm just neurotic, but I don't like this. I preferred it when Safeway didn't know who I was. The checkers were brusque but effective, offering little more than a "How's it going?" before they set to work. They were busy professionals who wanted to get me out of their line as smoothly and quickly as possible. And I was all for that. When I am in a supermarket, what I want most is to not be in the supermarket anymore. A checker who can get me out of the door in a hurry is a checker I can respect. Because supermarkets are just too much for me. N E X T_ P A G E .|. The toothpaste bazaar and the advent of the Stepford clerk