Choice - The Scourge Of The Modern Shopper

There is a pre-supposition in NLP that suggest that choice is better than no choice. It is probably the one pre-supposition that I do not whole-heartedly embrace.

Last week our vacuum cleaner stopped working. It was a Hoover Savvy and about a year old. When I took it in to get it looked at I was told that it would cost about $135 to mend. This for a vacuum that only cost $175 new so I declined.

Since then we have been trying to decide what to replace it with and neither my wife nor me can make our minds up. That isn’t because there are so few brands and models to go at but because there are so many, there’s literally dozens all claiming to be the best.. We have been paralyzed by choice.

This is not something that I have given that much thought to before but in retrospect I think it happens more often than I realized. I spent 15 minutes last night trying to decide which pizza to order and earlier on in the day I had stared at about a 30 different types of preserve in disbelief before giving up and buying nothing.

Consumer choice is supposed to make our lives better and more enjoyable, but does it? Surely if on the occasions that I buy nothing simply because I don’t know what to buy it is defeating the object. I lose out, the store loses out and the manufacturer loses out. Do I need 6 different types of cheese mixed together and grated for me? Is my palate even sophisticated enough for me to tell the difference between 5 and 6 cheeses?

In my local Publix they seem to offer about 13 billion different types of yogurt. There is reduced fat, low fat, fat free, full fat, creamy yogurt, set yogurt, live yogurt and presumably dead yogurt. There is strawberry cheesecake, key lime pie, very berry, dog and duck (maybe), apricot and mango, blueberry, orange and I think I spotted penguin flavor. Guess what though? The one item that appears to be nearly always out of stock or at the very best low on is strawberry. I reckon that half the time I go to get some strawberry yogurt there is none but the shelves are chock full of stuff nobody appears to be buying.

I honestly don’t know the reason for all this is but I can take a guess. I reckon it is fear. Fear that if suppliers and stores don’t keep offering us ever more choice that their competitors will, and they will steal the market from under their noses. I am guessing the reality is that this wouldn’t happen and most consumers would prefer less choice. Who needs a menu that runs to 20 pages (Cheesecake Factory?) or a supermarket that stocks 52 different types of beer or even 175 different flavors of ice cream, it’s really not that important and just adds the burden of giving us one more decision to make that we could quite frankly do without.

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