That’s me, in the grocery store check-out line, worried that the attractive woman behind me has made an unkind character assessment based on the commodities rolling along the conveyor belt. Light this. Lo-cal that. Sugar free. Fat free. Meat free. Lactose deprived. Such an unmanly grocery list, she’s thinking. (At least I’m thinking that’s what she’s thinking.) All in obvious contradiction to the physique of the fellow about to swipe his credit card.

A voice from behind the cash register wakes me from self-obsessed ruminations. “Sir, would you like to donate to….”

To what, exactly, I don’t remember. I never remember. But she’s looking at me. The bagboy is looking at me. I’m sure, in my mounting consternation, that the pretty woman in queue behind me is looking too, waiting for this final bit of information, this insight into my character, before formulating a final judgment: Is this the man I want to bring home to meet Momma?

“Okay,” I mumble. How much? Don’t remember that either. Just another $1 or $2 or $5 added to the credit card bill. Who knows? Whatever the woman at the cash register says. Whatever the price of check-out-line dignity, I pay.

Lately variations of this scenario (with a changing cast of judgmental women joining me in the check-out line) unfold at nearly every cash register of every supermarket, drug store and big box retailer I visit. Each time, I’m plunged into the mini-existential crisis that comes with a charitable donation estranged from a charitable impulse. A contribution based solely on this weird sort of checkout-line peer pressure, devoid of that nice, self-congratulatory feeling that comes when you give the kid down the block $20 for the diabetes walk-a-thon.

“You feel aggrieved,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, professor of Public Affairs and Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University. “You’re put under pressure in a very public way to give. Not as a voluntary choice. Not something you care about. But rather because you’re embarrassed not to give.”

“You’ve just made a prophet of me with my students,” said Lenkowsky, when I called him Wednesday to ask about this escalating prevalence of check-out charity solicitations. He had been discussing the growing media awareness of the phenomenon over the last two years.

“It’s really on the upswing,” said Sandra Miniutti, vice president of marketing for Charity Navigator, the nation’s largest evaluator of charities and their financial practices. Number One in Charity Navigator’s “Top Ten Practices of Savvy Donor” does not read like an endorsement of checkout solicitations: “Smart givers generally don’t give reactively in a knee-jerk reaction. They don’t respond to the first organization that appeals for help. They take the time to identify which causes are most important to them and their families.”

Miniutti, a University of Miami grad, never donates without checking the effectiveness of the charity. She just says no at the checkout line. Charity Navigator does expects to launch a smartphone app next year for those of us in need of instant evaluation. Me, I’d need another app that serves to delude the women behind me. (Suddenly, with a 4G-connection, the guy in front of her looked like Brad Pitt in a Salvation Army uniform).