Picture your favourite furniture warehouse on a busy Sunday afternoon - a hell of jams and queues where the thing you want is invariably soldout. Now picture the way that Louis XIV bought his furniture. He didn't have to force his way through crowds of people brandishing rubber plants and folding chairs to grab the lampshade that he wasn't quite sure about but thought just might go with the living room carpet.

In future the way we all shop is going to be different, promises US business guru Don Peppers. It will be more Sun King and less Gergesene swine.

Peppers is the author of a system of doing business he calls "mass individualisation". His ideas are already sweeping North America where he earns millions of dollars telling big companies like the Bank of America how to introduce his system.

The idea is that by using information technology companies can offer the masses the kind of tailor-made service that would once have been the preserve of the Upper Ten Thousand.

Levis are already doing this with their made to measure jeans which are cheaper than ordinary ones. Shoe buyers in the United States can go to the Custom Foot. It measures their feet and can offer any kind of shoe style made to fit for around 150 dollars. After their feet have been measured the buyer can choose from hundreds of styles on the net without going near the shop.

But the system will go further - soon it will be able to use advanced computer science called neural networking to identify the kind of shoes that a person with your shoe buying history and personality profile is going to like and then offer them to you. Neural networking lets the computer test literally millions of hypotheses - such as that dental nurses living in the home counties with cats named Sooty tend to prefer X type shoes. The computer can create an "image community" of people with similar tastes and then judge what type of shoe you will like based on what the others in the group are buying.

"Customers don't really want choice. They want someone to know what they want and give it to them," says Peppers. "When I see an ad saying come and look at thousands of couches in our sofa warehouse, I don't find that attractive, I find that a wearying prospect, I want to say 'Here are the couches I have in my house, here is my price range, show me the 50 I might like.' ."

Companies are fighting increasingly hard to attract new customers but the hard sell puts people off, says Peppers an ex advertising man whose vision is of a world where junk mail no longer thumps hopelessly through our letter boxes and where companies no longer see the point of screaming their wares from every billboard and TV screen. "All these companies are shouting 'I'm better, I'm better, I'm better'. They all say that and they say it to everyone," says Peppers. All this will be rethought in what he calls "the interactive age".

These changes are already on the way - they are already visible on the world wide web where Amazon Books (www.amazon.com), one of the most successful of Peppers "one to one" enterprises operates, selling millions of books. An Amazon customer will automatically be told about a book that might interest them based on the information they choose to give the company.

The net is obviously the prime site for these one to one marketers. Banks will soon be able to create an individual web site for each customer with their own account information on it.

There will be worries - about security of information and also the abuse of it. But one to one enterprises will have to make a contract witH their customers promising not to sell on the information they have or to abuse it, telling them clearly what they plan to do with it, says Peppers. Work continues on encrypting data securely. The anti commerical ethos in the internet too is gradually being overcome.

But the changes go much further than the net. Soon supermarkets though loyalty cards will know more about what is in your fridge than you do.

They will also be able to remind you that you may be low on coffee or loo roll. Knowing you are a vegetarian, they might tell you of a special offer on organic milk. It will be easier for you and more efficient for the shop if you do use the internet to send your order which you then pick up or have delivered.

The shop where you buy your Christmas presents will remind you what you bought for everyone last year, giftwrap, send them and debit your credit card.

The florists where you bought roses for last year's anniversary will send you a reminder two weeks before the next one, asking if you want the same order to be delivered. Too bad if your wife has run off with the supermarket delivery man in the meantime.

It sounds great for the well-off and over busy. But there is a downside. Firms will start to differentiate more and more between customers. Rich ones will be spared no obsequiousness. But what about the poorer ones?

Some customers will simply be classed "below zero" - not worth serving. Little old ladies who chat unprofitably to the bank teller for instance will be charged prohibitive rates to force them to close their accounts.

Jobs will be lost. Identifying the shoes a customer wants before producing them will cut down on waste but it will also cut down on production.

Personal contact between customers and staff will also be cut. It is better to use a machine to communicate wherever possible, says Peppers, because then the company can control the "dialogue interface".

In the faintly sinister language of Peppers' new book Enterprise One to One: "Some customers are more equal than others". Sound familiar?

Enterprise One to One by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers published by Doubleday is on sale in the UK from later this month. (www.marketing1to1.com)