In the 1950s she'd walk into the butcher's shop at the corner of her road. We've just got in some lamb chops - nice and lean the way you like them. On the other hand Sainsbury's, and all other supermarkets, would snip their toes off with bolt cutters for the ability to give personal service like that. They have the information to do it. But they don't have the technology or the delivery system to implement it.
Modern life is rubbish.
Fundamentally most of the problems you've identified in cluetrain seem to stem from the transition of micro to macro in the economics of our everyday lives. We now benefit from economies of scale at the cost of any modicum of humanity creeping into our dealings with brands. But I think that it's a temporary problem, because many of these Industrial Age monoliths are pretty doomed. I thought Neal Stephenson made a brilliant comparison between the Linux version of business vs Microsoft. When you have a problem with Linux, you get online and people fix it for free.