The foundation of Apple'a current success is based on this principle -- curation of a selection of best options from a wide possible range makes buying decisions easier for customers than giving them the whole phase space.
Before Steve Jobs returned in the late 90s, Apple's Mac range was a hot mess. Apple was trying to compete with the entire range of PC manufacturers, so in addition to licensed third-party Mac clones, they were making multiple ranges of desktop Mac with overlapping specs, on the principle that they could occupy one shelf slot per machine in Fry's or Target with each model. So you had the Centris, the Performa, and the Quadra ranges, with high, middle, and low end machines in each range, educational and professional media authoring variants, and the powerbook range ...
Jobs returned and priority #1 was to staunch the cash haemorrhage. Rationalizing the product range and supply chain was a huge part of this. So he drew a simple diagram. X-axis: consumer and professional. Y-axis: desktop and portable. Four models would occupy the entire grid, with roughly three specification levels in each (think Goldilocks and the Three Bears). This gave us the iBook and iMac machines (consumer), and the Powerbook and Mac Pro machines (professional), with differentiation based on CPU speed/memory/disk capacity within each cell.
This made the choice of which machine to buy vastly easier on the customer; it was glaringly obvious which model you wanted, all you had to do was decide how much speed/memory/disk capacity you needed, and that was it, rather than trying to figure out what the difference was between a Centris 630 and a Quadra 630AV (hint: RGB video out, 10MHz, and about $250) and so on ...
This turned the precipitous decline in Mac sales around. It took years to build up to the current powerhouse, but it staunched the arterial bleeding -- and all by giving the customers less choice, not more.
BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it. Hell, if I look for Apple Routers, they dont' even list the Airport Extreme - they don't even have the Apple routers tagged consistently - they have both Apple and Apple(R).
"BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it."
Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.
As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is.
You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.
I think it's the issue of the fact that they're selling so many different brands of products across so many different product lines (from fryers to washing machines to routers to laptops). So building the optimal sorting algorithm becomes an exercise for each and every line, and also involves standardizing the fields you receive from a variety of different manufacturers and distributors.
Certainly not an easy game, and definitely a tedious one. I know I'd hate to be on the team tasked with figuring that one out.
Agreed. I think this is one part that the author misses in his article. Overall, choice is not bad, but the feeling of uncertainty caused by an unorganized selection is the problem here.
A similar thing happens in video games. Many developers get feedback from users and UX people that too many options are bad. THey then remove the COMPLETELY, which should not make any sense. Even a small submenu somewhere to enable advanced settings is fine, but removing them? Why?
Apple doesn't always compete the same way other businesses do in other markets. I know plenty of people who would never even look at Apple computers because they're Windows users, but Windows users have hundreds of options that Microsoft doesn't even make. Apple has much more control over its brand than its competitors do (in some categories.)
Nobody goes out to buy an Asus router. They just go out to buy a router, and Asus can't stop them from being flooded with options. By some stroke of fate, Apple can.
It's only 24 options and you can filter by what you want to the left of the product listings. Each filter cuts your number of choices by more than half. Who gets paralyzed with this??
Here in NYC where there are restaurants on every corner, one of the best ways to figure out which restaurants are the best to eat at is to look at the menus. If they have a lot of choice they'll probably attract people and be able to stay in business even if their food is mediocre. But if they only have 6-8 items on the menu, you know that menu is filled with 6-8 delicious items, because they couldn't stay in business any other way.
When the market's large enough, you can get by by offering so many options that a bunch of people naturally take you up on some of them enough to maintain a profit, or you can offer a small selection of very quality items that continually please. I know which one I prefer.
I use this method for everything. If I see a restaurant with pages and pages of options, I know that it's extremely rare for a kitchen to be able to properly manage all those dishes and make them well. Unfortunately, it leaves little room for an amazing dish because the kitchen is so busy with all the other random dishes. And it usually means they are freezing things or otherwise not using very fresh ingredients.
If you have a single page menu, it usually means some very careful thought went into what went on that menu. And like others have said, those places are turning people away due to lack of choice, so if they continue to be in business with a small menu, it's usually a sign of good food. Or really great marketing/atmosphere ;)
I always look for restaurants for a limited menu for precisely this reason, and am rarely disappointed by them. on the flip side I find it a turn off when a place has a 3-4 page menu, and the food is often (but not always) mediocre.
Downside is that the "6-8 items on the menu" often means "vegetarians have 1 option" and similar problems for people who have restricted diets.
At the other end are the Vietnamese restaurants with 2 pages of soup where English-language names are "soup with noodles and pork" for like 4 different items.
Note that these are mostly benefits for Apple, not for the consumer.
As a consumer, I need a 256GB SSD and 16GB ram. My only choice is to spend $2000 on other macbook pro features I don't need. When I went with a custom PC builder instead (lots of choices - first pick the chassis, then pick the CPU, then pick the RAM, then pick the disk), I got what I needed for $1300.
I don't often bill out at $700/hour (probably the total time I spent on this choice), so Apple's lack of choice certainly wouldn't have helped me.
- Consumer A already chose what she wants, and she just needs to find it out.
- Consumer B knows her preferences, but she needs to make the choice.
- Consumer C is not aware of which attributes are important in the decision process.
You are a consumer A, so this simplification did not help YOU.
It did help consumers B and consumer C.
Therein is the problem with all of these prescriptive theoreticians who say we would be happier with fewer choices. As someone who is routinely "Consumer A" in nearly all walks of life, I would find it inordinately frustrating and harmful for society to offer fewer—potentially no—choices. It would be stifling, and I think worse still, such a monoculture would encourage shunning of those who want something other than the singular option.
I'm all for assisting Consumer C by way of tools like Consumer Reports, and modern evolutions of the same notion of helping fill information gaps. But I rail against the idea that choices should be eliminated to curtail the stress of Consumer C.
No surprise: I am not an Apple consumer. In fact, I routinely write about how every technology company is not yet making the devices and technologies I want in my life (e.g., [1]). Choice is absolutely not hurting progress toward my ideal, though. Choice is, along with purchasing power and my (small) voice, among the few forces that allow me to exert a proportionate "steering" effect on the industry.
Studying the purported satisfaction gap of Consumer C versus the free market and concluding—as the very title of the article does—that it is definitely "stressing us [all] out" rings of thinly-veiled authoritarianism. And that is bad. Luckily for me, for the time being, many manufacturers and vendors have elected to (mostly) ignore these researchers. For example, most of the US food industry continues to give me a broad spectrum of choices from everything from breakfast cereal, to iced tea, to ice cream. I hope their own market research has revealed the combined voices of Consumer A & B are too loud to suppress in an ill-advised effort to satisfy C. Help guide C, but don't assume A & B do not exist.
@bhauer, I agree.
My point is: give the user the opportunity to decide how much effort to put in the process.
In a digital environment, this means giving her millions of alternatives, but helping her to prune them based on some principles that derive from the cognitive sciences.
For instance, the faceted navigation allows the consumer to eliminate the alternatives she is not interested in. This is the B consumer, who knows what is important for her (e.g. "a 256GB SSD and 16GB ram").
If you are the consumer C (and everybody of us is in such situation when we have to buy something and we are not expert at all) can be helped using the best sellers (see Amazon.com), the suggested for you, the ratings of other consumers, and so on.
In a physical environment, however, you can not filter, and cutting the less selling products helps the majority of customers in the decision making effort, even if this means giving less choice.
You're attacking a straw man. There's a difference between a limited choice offered by a particular company and a limited choice in the marketplace. No one is arguing for the latter.
OP used Apple as an example so let's stick with it. If someone wants to buy a laptop to browse the internet, use e-mail, organize photos etc. they learn very quickly that MacBook Air is for them. Then they need to pick a screen size (11" or 13"), decide if they need more storage than in the base model and they're done. Apple is essentially a curator, which is a very valuable service. But we would be much worse off if we only had Apple clones on the market.
People around here know much more about computers and smartphones than an average consumer so these examples are not convincing. But consider microwave ovens. Recently I had a displeasure to look for a new one. If some company decided to scrap their entire line and settle on two or three base models with clear differences between each, it would be a great benefit to many costumers.
There's a difference between a limited choice offered by a particular company and a limited choice in the marketplace. No one is arguing for the latter.
From the article:
"...too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?"
"consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options."
"Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies."
The other point that this sort of thinking misses is that first time buyers are often just not educated. For instance, I don't know how many times in my life I decided I needed X. I bough X thinking it would fulfill my needs. After talking to the X owners group, I realize that my variation of X doesn't do this other thing that I now find would be very useful. Now I want X' that has this feature.
This goes on and on. However, unless a company makes X''' that has every feature available in the known universe, I have no shot of finding what I really want/need.
This also boils down to good advice I got long ago. Buy once, cry once. Meaning: do you research, determine what you need and buy that thing, not the entry level thing.
It did when the alternative was the entire educational process behind knowing what they need, what tradeoffs are inherent, what the price should be, what vendors provide it at the acceptable price, what drawbacks come with those other vendors, living with those drawbacks, etc.
Technical people like to pretend it's the easiest thing in the world to "know" how much computer someone needs and to buy it. But if you're non-technical, all you hear is technical people saying "trust me". Which is precisely the same thing Apple is saying.
And, yes, we show them lower sticker prices. But Apple has a far better track record of delivering customer satisfaction than technical people recommending beige boxes. So, for anyone with the money, why in the world would they care for two seconds about "too much computer"?
"Aww shucks. I bought too much computer and loved it, instead of listening to the geeks, getting just enough, and hating it."
I'm sure that some of that is true, but part of B and C's problem is that they might underestimate their own needs, too. There's also a bit of Dunner-Kruger effect there.
The difference between a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop can be astounding. I suspect many purchasers of the cheaper laptop will regret it, where the purchasers of a $1000 laptop will have a more powerful, better built computer that might last them longer.
(And in fact, with laptops at least, some cheaper laptops are "more powerful" because they're thicker and heavier; and the expense of the faster components further contributes to their poor build quality. Many more-expensive laptops put more money into thoughtful design, rather than "Spec competitions" and you get a slightly-slower, longer-lasting one. Compare cheap Android phones to flagship ones, for example.
-------------------------
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Not to defend Apple, but the flip side is trying to figure out which of Dell's 30 or so monitors are current (and which have which connectors). Apple has one monitor (a bit obsolete and a bit overpriced), but you can quickly decide for or against it.
Too many choices may be stressing, but I think you lose out with too few choices too. If you need a specific size monitor to fit a space and the one monitor Apple has does not fit that space, you are SOL.
As other commenters have noted, this benefits Apple more than the average consumer. They can offer one or a couple of options, overprice them, and make a lot of money. Ideally, on such a big purchase (although for mobile devices a lot of the cost is not immediately apparent because you pay comparatively little upfront), someone would seek to reduce their choices by doing research on the various options available and deciding which would work best for them. For the monitor example, first filter by screen size, then filter by resolution, then connectors available, etc. for all the features that are important in that case. The options that are left are the best options available in the judgement of the person making the purchase, and then the decision between a handful of options becomes much easier. They can save money by getting only what they want.
Quickly deciding for or against just the one option benefits Apple the most. You end up trading money for ease of choice. I for one would rather keep my money in exchange for extra research, but it seems today's culture has an extreme phobia of stress (which is a whole other dicussion in itself).
Sorry to pick out one tiny point from your post, but, I truly don't think that much of anything they sell is "overpriced". It's more expensive than competitors stuff, but their stuff...sucks.
When I think about the quality of a shitty Dell, HP, ASUS (enter your choice of brand here) laptop computer that can be bought at 1/2 the price of an Apple product, and how it will probably have a totally dead battery in a year. And that half the keys on the keyboard won't work. And the hinges for the monitor will be close to severing. And that I will have had to hack together a *NIX environment that sort of functions 50% of the time. And that the trackpad will suck. And it goes on.
I will gladly pay for Apple doing the work for me, giving me a machine that will last for literally years without fail, getting me a solid dev environment from day 1 with little to none of my time and effort spent.
Apple has only one monitor, and it is clearly out of date (not ultra resolution, not of same body type as current Apple products). So I quickly figure out I don't want it with no stress.
I am more likely to buy a Dell monitor. But I would be even more likely if the website was more oriented to the task of telling me which monitors are current in each class.
Other companies swamp you with choice. Hotpoint washing machines come in loads of different forms. And I'm sure for most people, they don't really care. I'm not quite sure about the logic behind this. Have you a better chance of getting more products on the shop floor?
A complicating factor is big box retailers' wish to offer a 'price match guarantee' (particularly to persuade you to bother to come in rather than to buy from Amazon), but never have to pay up on it, which leads them to carry 'retailer exclusive' models from each manufacturer, which might have a suspiciously similar specification to a model sold elsewhere, but in fact have a different model number.
I don't think it was so much choice, but complexity in an organization and the associated costs. He (rightly IMO) focused on Apple's strengths and fought the bureaucratic malaise that plagues so many large organizations.
“This gave us the iBook and iMac machines (consumer), and the Powerbook and Mac Pro machines (professional)”
Small nitpick: the Mac Pro series didn’t exist until Apple switched over from PowerPC processors to Intel in 2006. What you meant were the PowerBook and Power Mac machines.
The Guardian is reading far too much into Tesco's actions. Following the Paradox of Choice, the effect was widely studied and found to not be particularly robust. The classic jam study (cited by this article) failed to replicate. There are various circumstances when having more choices increases sales as well (e.g., a higher priced option that no one takes can cause more sales of the low priced choice). Even the author of "Paradox of Choice" admits the science is far from settled.
I've been to Tesco. From a consumer's perspective, it's amazing - I really wish I had a place like Tesco where I am. Most likely the reason Tesco is reducing choices is because stocking more SKUs is expensive, but at the end of the day the customer buys the same quantity of cheese. Choice is fantastic for the consumer, particularly the consumer with minority tastes. If you are an Indian or Nigerian person living in the UK and you are hungry for some home food, Tesco's got you covered.
I'm not even going to discuss the blatant cheerleading for state monopolies and Corbyn.
Choice is certainly under-rated and we take it for granted in the Western world.
Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. Consumer choice may have even been a major driver in taking down centrally planned economies.
Boris Yeltsin while visiting a supermarket in Houston:
> Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.” [0]
> Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated.
Supermarket choice is often largely the illusion of choice -- the same product (substantively, and often literally, made in the same facility to the same specifications) in different packaging
Even if you reduced every variant of an item in a supermarket from the 80s down to its essence, a supermarket would still cream a Soviet-era food market in selection, and most especially, reliability. I tried to find a "fair" picture of a Soviet-era market for you to see in Google images, but, all I could find were pictures of empty shelves. While this is not 100% representative, it does say something real.
If it is an "illusion", it's still built on a solid base of real choice that centralized government management completely failed to produce.
No one is really knocking substantive choice, just the fake illusory choice such as the toothpaste manufacturer with 15 lines of effectively identical paste.
Really? Here is the subtitle of the linked article:
> From jeans to dating partners and TV subscriptions to schools, we think the more choices we have the better. But too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?
Perception is reality. I'm not a psychologist but if someone is fooling themselves into thinking they're consuming a better product, so much so that they actually pay a premium for that product, who are you to say that it's not "substantially" better? The connection many people have in consumption is very personal. Imagine someone telling you their spouse is better than your own in all objective criteria.
I've heard (although can't verify) that products were differentiated in the Soviet Union by where they were made. So essentially, the consumer would have a choice of "factory 1 shampoo", "factory 2 shampoo" and so on. Meaningful? Sure, but seems silly to me.
As for differentiation of goods in Soviet Union it went as:
- made in USSR: hard to buy
- made in USSR for export: takes a bribe to buy
- made in Soviet block countries (DDR, Czechoslovakia): requires bribe and connections
- made in Western countries: you better be high-profile member of a communist party
This doesn't make a lot of sense as a critique of choice. If you don't like the options available in a regular supermarket, you can go up one level and visit higher-end supermarkets, or even smaller specialty stores instead of chains.
Now, it is true that it requires more effort to find the foods you're interested in. That's because most people aren't interested in the same foods you are. There's no way to "fix" this problem beyond heavy-handed government intervention, and in a socialist society I can guarantee you that -- unless the Supreme Leader is also keen on foods without refined sugar -- you're going to find it even harder to locate anything which isn't preferred by the mass market.
To add a bit of a counter-point, seeing as I found this paragraph recently, here's a section from "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. It's discussing the experience of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs hacker that later got sued, when coming to America:
> He arrived in New York city in 1990 and moved into a dorm room at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, a sort of Jewish YMCA. Two things shocked him about his new home: the diversity of the people on the streets and the fantastic range of foods in the grocery stores. He took photographs of the rows and rows of sausages in Manhattan and mailed them to his mother in Moscow. "I'd never seen so many sausages," he says. But once he'd marveled at the American cornucopia, he stepped back from it all and wondered just how necessary all of this food was.
I would say he was just a product of his environment and unconsciously defended the system he was raised in. Many people are blinded to the detriments of their surroundings because it's all they know.
The English word "vegetarian" was formed in 19th century from a Latin-via-French word combined with a Latin-via-French suffix. Not quite as Old English as "meat"...
I'm not sure I'd agree. Personally I don't find choice debilatating, but I know plenty of people who do - my girfriend finds it very difficult to make choices, and has to research things to the Nth degree to ensure she's not making a wrong one, and a lot of the kids I teach find options anxiety to be a real problem. However, when faced with an area where there is choice but I have little information (such as buying a given spice in Tesco and there are 3 seemingly equivalent choices) I have experienced this.
I'd agree about the tagging on of the Corbyn bit at the end - I don't think it has anything to do with the article - but I'm not sure that the high priced choice you cite is necessarily the same thing?
I also know plenty of people who find lack of choice debilitating. Ramanujan - an Indian living in the UK was debilitated by the absence of Idlis. (In the modern world, Tesco has him covered.) I'm certainly unhappy in northwest Delhi when I can't find a decent dosa, pasta or croissant [1].
Minorities exist, and some of them really need those choices that paralyze your girlfriend. I think a better solution is for your girlfriend to learn coping skills than for my ex-girlfriend to suffer with Indian shampoo that doesn't work for African hair.
[1] Or at least such things are 1.5 hours away in Khan market.
We should probably distinguish between range and choice here - between things that the consumer can see are not the same, and things where they can't see the difference.
Choosing from "croissant, bagel, loaf" is much easier than choosing from "white sandwich tin loaf A, white sandwich tin loaf B, white sandwich tin loaf C".
We should definitely distinguish between different consumers.
I personally have always drawn fine distinctions between different types of loaf. At one time I could barely tell the difference between naan and roti.
A friend of mine - who can easily distinguish between paratha, lecha paratha, kerala paratha and methi paratha - can barely tell the difference between croissant and loaf.
So what are you proposing? Taking away my artisinal whole grain sourdough loaf, or taking away her lecha paratha?
I'm not proposing anything specific, and I'm certainly not proposing "taking away" anything. Just noting that for sheer logistical reasons not every shop can stock every exact item, and more similar products are easier to substitute.
I assume you are referring to the mathmatician. It's odd because reading what you said makes me think I'd rather a diversity of product types, but I care less about having more than one of each type. Having said that, Tesco stock a Jamaican stout (Dragon), and for about a year, they didn't stock it. And it intrinsically annoyed me. They did replace with a like product after a while (Guiness version), but I didn't like that.
Which makes me aware that you can get fussy over different brands/tastes. Beer is a good example actually.
There was something that really bugged me about being offered the product and then having it withdrawn, it's replacement wasn't enough.
But this is not lack of choice. It's lack of availability. Wouldn't one good brand of pasta solve most of your pasta needs? Do you really feel like you'd still be unhappy unless you had 10 shapes of pasta each made from one of three different grains, each available from two or three different brands?
The fact that I don't eat fusilli very much doesn't mean that other people don't.
The thought experiment surrounding the removal of choice is not the removal of choices that other people make. It's the removal of your favorite choices, particularly if you are a minority.
> Most likely the reason Tesco is reducing choices is because stocking more SKUs is expensive
Many supermarket chains also charge producers for shelf space, so dropping products and cranking the rates charged for placement is a great revenue stream. Awful for the customer and for producers, of course.
The SKU cost is worth exploring the context that Tesco is facing massive pressure from the lower end of the market in Lidl and Aldi.
Separately it also allows for better bargaining power with the suppliers, fewer brands on the shelves = Tesco having greater competition between brands to get on the shelves.
I agree. The other day, I stood in the supermarket contemplating the 20 different types of Colgate toothpaste.
Did I want Whitening? No. Sensitive Teeth? No. Those were easy choices. What about the Anti-Cavity version? Now that sounds good. But, but I also have some gum disease, so perhaps Gum Care is the right choice? But what about the formulation that promised Harder Teeth?
Perhaps I should just get Colgate Total. But does Total have as much anti-cavity stuff as the Anti-Cavity variant? does it have as much as much gum care stuff as the Gum Care variant? It costs the same as both, so maybe its kind of a bit of everything and not as good as anything.
In the end I bought Aquafresh. In the old days I thought that Total was the best I could get - now I'm not so sure.
My ex-girlfriend had the opposite problem. She stood in the market and contemplated only a few choices in shampoo - basically regular and hair fall rescue. She went with regular. Her hair got all messed up - apparently Indian and African hair are actually very different and Africans actually need fancy African shampoo.
At the end of the day she did have only one choice - cut her hair short and spend 1000rs/month (plus about 6 hours) having a Nigerian woman give her an (illegal) weave.
Choice sucks when you are part of the majority who's needs are catered to.
"... I thought that Total was the best I could get - now I'm not so sure."
I used to think this too but when they started introducing multiple variants I switched to Oral B Pro Expert. It was a no brainer because Pro Expert was fast becoming the new 'best you could get'.
Alas Pro Expert has also now morphed into many variations on the same theme.
My hygienist however, who's devotion to dental hygiene is beyond question, has never asked me what brand of toothpaste I use?
>Why do we always want the best? I had to get a toothbrush the other day. Before I left my house, I searched “best toothbrush.” It seemed like the sensible thing to do.
>As I typed in the searchbox, the auto-fill completed the thought immediately. I wasn’t alone in my toothbrush purchase insecurity. A flurry of articles came up with conflicting opinions and, for a moment, I felt stupid.
>Every toothbrush I bought on a hunch has been fine. I’ve never been disappointed in a toothbrush. Why waste my time trying to find the best? Have you ever run into someone with no teeth and asked, “What happened?”
>And they replied, “Bought the wrong toothbrush. Should have done more research.”
I can't agree that toothbrushes are all the same. Some irritate my gums more than others. On some the brushes deform so fast they last a very short time.
So I would say that choice in toothbrush matters, for me. Same for toothpaste, largely because of taste. Most of it has this terrible taste, I prefer the ones with an added mint taste that hides the other stuff.
That said, I don't think for a second that searching for "best toothbrush" or "best toothpaste" on google is likely to answer the question, which would I prefer? You just have to try different things until you find the one you like, and hope the company doesn't rename its whole product line in two months.
Choice is good. There is rarely an objectively "best" version of anything.
It's important to know that most people make this choice once in a lifetime. After that they'll buy the same product until they die. I'm pretty sure you'll buy Aquafresh from now on if you like it. So choice is difficult the first time but the next time it will be easy.
That's the reason why it's important to advertise children as early as possible. Because once they decided on a product it's very hard to convince them of something better.
The point is that I've been buying toothpaste from Colgate pretty much for my entire life. The manufacturers attempt to segment the market just drove me away.
And that segmentation ensures that it isn't just a once a lifetime choice. Each to time I look at the Colgate shelf I have to consider what is more important to me this week - the state of my gums or the likelihood of cavities.
The manufacturers aren't trying to segment the market. They are trying to claim shelf space. (The amount of Colgate they sell is proportional to the shelf space the store offers them, which is proportional to the number of varieties they offer.) If Colgate had only one variety and Crest had ten varieties, then Crest would get that much more shelf space and vastly outsell Colgate.
Grocery stores also like to offer their customers the illusion of choice, while dealing with as few distributors as possible. This simplifies their logistics. They would prefer to sell ten varieties of Colgate and Crest than ten separate brands of toothpaste. It gets ridiculous when you see half an aisle of Wheat Thins (original, whole wheat, low salt, spicy, plus the store clone brand of each of those). But I suppose the nice consequence is that small corner markets can have just as good a selection, effectively, as huge superstores.
I wish... I'm only 35 and I've had to change deoderant 4 times due to my preferred brand and scent disappearing. Toothpaste is a bit better with it only having happened twice.
> Let the market decide...in the end, I just can't imagine all those types of toothpaste will survive.
The idea that the "market will decide" is based on people in aggregate making informed decisions, such that the poor products fail. The reality is that people are not masters of every domain, toothpaste choices are basically arbitrary, but it's more time consuming to inspect 30 options than to inspect 5.
Also there is the practise of building one manufacturing line and selling the product under multiple brands [1], giving you "artificial" choice. If we're going to reduce choice, starting with these would be low hanging fruit.
That's an interesting observation! "The market" is aware of how we make decisions. Its no accident there are too many choices, thus we can't keep them all in our heads, so we can't ever find the best or worst brand. That's got to be intended!
>Also there is the practise of building one manufacturing line and selling the product under multiple brands [1], giving you "artificial" choice.
Ok, so what is your solution?
It should seem just as obvious that having some sort of regulated toothpaste market is also a form of "artificial choice" ie someone(s) somewhere are limiting it.
Ah, so you pose it as selecting the lesser of two evils, regulation constricted choice, or capitalism fuelled artificial choice? Option A burns political capital to enforce, option B externalises the costs to consumers.
I think the real solution is to address the root of the problem, which is that people (in aggregate) are not making informed decisions. We need to reduce the time/effort required to evaluate the options. It seems like the information age is already moving us in the right direction -- internet searching with your smartphone is quite easy and you can do it on the spot. But we're also moving backwards due to the excessive number of choices; searching >=20 toothpastes is still too daunting, and there is the issue of artificial reviews posted by toothpaste sellers.
Additional regulation could be the answer if it helps customers compare products. We have nutritional information panels on food products, they are always the same format and are easy to compare. Medicinal products have the active ingredients and concentrations listed so you can compare.
An option is to verify the product claims and include those in a standard format like the nutritional panel. Vaguely positive statements like "supports a healthy lifestyle" wouldn't make it in, but solid statements like "kills >99% bacteria" would after it's been verified.
If it makes feel you better, it doesn't matter. Last day I was comparing the ingredients of the whitening vs non-whitening of another brand (don't remember which), and not only the active ingredient was the same, it was also present in the exact same quantity. It was literally the same toothpaste. I'd assume Colgate does the same.
Crest doesn't use triclosan, if you are remotely concerned (there's some research showing a link to propensity for allergies, so that might be a reason to avoid it, but the consensus seems far from conclusive)
At least when it comes to food, a small selection feels curated, as if the grocery owner is vetting this food for me and saying "These are the jams I find worth your time". A supermarket with 8 brands and 38 total selections didn't take the time to help me. I suppose it's like when non-techies walk into Best Buy and there are 40 laptops to choose from, ranging from Atoms/Celerons to various i7 types. We have all done it before on the phone: "anything but the Celeron... yes it's cheaper... but it's slow, just don't get those" - basically we narrow down the selection significantly by saying "at least 4GB ram, i3,i5,i7".
The analogy is not perfect because there's a big price difference in laptops. But making the consumer feel "safer" with their choice by eliminating the really bad choices up front lets them shop worry-free. This small selection thing can be bad too, though - I for one hate shopping at Walmart because I know without a doubt that whatever I am purchasing is the absolute lowest common denominator in terms of quality. They might have 2 different types of lawn chairs, and you better believe that both will fall apart just after the 1 year warranty is up. It all comes down to trust; if you trust the store in their selection, you'll enjoy shopping there.
Indeed, this point came up in a conversation about Whole Foods. Sure, they are often overpriced, and you can find many of the same brands and products in other stores, but by shopping at Whole Foods, you can at least have confidence that any random product on the shelf is at a reasonably high level of quality.
When one of my children was about 4 or 5 we visited friends in Abu Dhabi. We went out for brunch in one of the 6* hotels there.
The pudding table was enormous with 3 chocolate fountains, piles of cakes, the works.
My son went up to the table, stood there for about 3 minutes, then burst into tears. Just the thought of deciding what he wasn't going to eat was too much for him.
"Not only is Tesco reducing its number of products, but the new leader of the Labour party has just been elected on a political platform that, in part, challenges the rhetoric of choice. Jeremy Corbyn proposes to renationalise not just the rail network but public utilities (gas, electricity and water), partly in the hope that the reduction of choice will provide a fairer, less anxiety-inducing experience for their users."
Two things,
First, is the author really that naive to think that the reason Corbyn wants to renationalise energy distribution is to reduce the stress on consumer from too many choices?
Second I am wondering how many people are anxious about the choice of their rail or energy distribution company.
And after sprinkling the almost unrelated Thiel speech, this became an absurd ending to an already shaky article.
The thing is, rail and energy are to a great extent bogus choices. For many journeys there's only one possible operator. On short haul services, there's no seat reservation either. So the only possible variable is how far in advance you buy your ticket and what railcards you present.
Electricity is even more bogus: the company you pay is neither the company that owns the generators nor the company that owns the transmission lines. It's a pure middleman. You're locked in a pure struggle with a set of billing systems, which you have to "game" in order to get the best deal.
To be honest, I get anxious when choosing a company to buy my rail ticket. Not to mention the whole horrible process of trying to find a suitable ticket. Splitting journey's etc, trying to work out the cheapest route etc. That's in the UK.
And I have a feeling of dread each year when it's time for broadband renewel. I can waste a couple of hours going through the options. Then present choices to my partner, who will most likely do the same.
Agree it's an article about decision paralysis/fatigue, with some tenuous examples/zeitgeist links.
NB I just learned about this yesterday - and was quite surprised. In that respect Corbyn might actually be tapping into a genuine change in public opinion.
As a Brit, then yes I think most people would rather a renationalisation, even the Tories. But it's weirdly complex, because Network Rail is back under public ownership. So the infrastructure is backed and bailed out by the tax payer.
As a user it's a shambles. The network hit capacity back in the Blair years, and there has been a drive to get people off of trains as a result.
A little ingenuity wouldn't go amiss. Like cheap, and cheaper tickets for off peak travelling etc. I know using the trains on the Brighton main line, isn't much fun.
Privatizing public infrastructure is not absurd. They just get the management from government's hands with the promise that they can do it with more efficiently. Even if it is far from perfect, they do a better job. Just anecdotal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...
Did you read the link you posted? Because it covered the major mismanagement which killed four people and directly resulted in renationalisation of UK rail infrastructure.
It's also worth noting that, for the UK rail system, most passenger operators are actually owned by public operators from other countries (like DB with their Arriva brand, NS with Abellio, etc.).
Unfortunately accidents happen, there are much bigger accidents happened in complete public rails. But if you check the measures , overall safety has been increased a great deal, actually it is considered as the safest in Europe, And for most accounts there are improvements (Customer satisfaction is up, Level of traffic is up, Fare increases are lower than before, Average train age unchanged, Punctuality unchanged, Safety is increased, Efficiency is up)
).
If it would be a real privatization, chances that it would be better.
The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose.
That's just ridiculous!
According to the author, a towering aisle of water battles reduces you to the Buridan's ass.[0] Yes, there are some hard choices that will force you to think hard and put you through emotional hell. Yes, there are choices that will make you stuck in analysis paralysis, but choosing which bottle of water to buy isn't one.
>Yes, there are choices that will make you stuck in analysis paralysis, but choosing which bottle of water to buy isn't one.
He was going for rhetorical effect. I think they should teach these things in reading/writing classes, so people don't take everything literally.
That said, choosing from "a towering aisle of water bottles" can still cost you up to a minute or more on deciding, which, while not Buridan's ass, it's still non-productive and worsens your shopping experience.
Nope. Making a simile with Buridan's ass is a strawman.
It's not that you wont be able to decide (yes, that would be ridiculous). It's that you will be less satisfied with the choice you make because it's harder for your to quantify the opportunity cost given so many alternatives.
From the article: you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose looks like the definition of Buridan's ass to me.
I'm familiar with the Schwartz's paradox of choice, but the author is pushing it too far. Does anyone really agonize over trivial choices such as which bottle of water to buy? Is anyone really getting dehydrated and unable to chose among many alternatives? Does anyone even considers opportunity cost when making such trivial choices?
My problem is not with the paradox of choice, my problem is with the author's trivialization of it.
I agonize because there are so many worthless options I will definitely not choose. I'm looking for any acceptable option - no chemical 'flavors'; no fancy bottle making it cost $$$. It takes time to winnow any wheat at all from the endless chaff.
I found a $0.79 bottle at my local quick stop, that actually fit in my bicycle water bottle holder for my lunchtime ride. Then, of course, the quick stop closed and was torn down. Woe is me.
Are organic soil filters a core tenant of our tribe? How do I balance my need for sport electrolytes with the inevitable guilt of consumerism that follows?
I wish there was a sandwich I'd like to eat, but there never is. Perhaps that's what it is. But yes I've been meaning to upgrade my laptop with an SSD for about a year, and still can't decide on size, make or model.
There are so many assumptions and logical problems in this article's reasoning... it's distressing to read.
First we assume that choosing to purchase jam is empirically better than choosing not to purchase jam. And we ignore the question of how the jam selection is made, when the supermarket chooses for you: what is driving the supermarket's selection of which single brand to offer? Is it price to quality ratio? Price? Partner deals on other brands? When I start a new jam company, do I aim to make a happy consumer, or a happy grocery store manager? This doesn't seem optimal for the consumer at all.
The argument is later 'bolstered' with the example of jeans; we're told that they SHOULD be "the ill-fitting sort", that “The secret to happiness is low expectations.” If you expect shitty jam, the supermarket can remove choice to satisfy your expectation. For that matter, so can the market of jam providers.
At last we get the example of pensions, where we can at least agree on the basic point that not choosing is definitely worse than choosing poorly. We're advised that employers should choose for the employees to prevent this outcome. Again we leave aside the question of how the employer selects a 'one-size-fits-all' pension plan. Does she optimize for the best pension for employees, or for the cheapest plan up front? And how does that change the behavior of pension plan companies?
Generally, choice in the market is an important driver of improving real and perceived value for consumers. Perhaps there are alternative solutions to 'choice paralysis' that don't involve sacrificing quality. Off the top of my head, expert advisors are a better solution than what the article offers. There are hundreds of wines at my local store, but I have no trouble making a choice with the guidance of the sommelier. There are thousands of health insurance options where I live (in Germany), but I'm confident that I make the right choice for my family with the guidance of my Versicherungsberater (insurance advisor). Interestingly this is a field that is difficult to automate, not least because humans trust human recommendations more than machine ones. I can imagine this author would praise the coming "advisor economy" as the solution to fears of machine-learning-driven unemployment.
In short: everyone accepts the premise that "choice paralysis" is real, and that it causes people to make sub-optimal choices. It's an enormous leap however, to get to "therefore having no choice, and expecting shitty outcomes, is the best answer."
Pensions are a particularly good example because they're impossible to quality control. You could theoretically do batch QC and assign taste experts to the jam to nominate a "best" jam. But the value of a pension is impossible to know, because it relies on the outcome of the pension firm's investment. And as the adverts are keen to disclaim, past performance is not a guide to future performance.
I have generally found that a random user on Hacker News is much less likely to be a troll than, say, Reddit. In light of that consideration, I'm left with a belief that the most likely cause of comments like these is simple misunderstanding of rhetorical technique in writing. This is not a character flaw - it could be a touch of autism, or simply that the context switch from the very literal and meticulous mode of interpretation required when looking at code all day was not fully context-switched out when reading journalistic prose. In any case, and for what it's worth, here are a few of what I found to be sensible interpretations of the points that caused distress for the above commenter:
Jam. I didn't read it as saying that the existence of jam positively and empirically correlates to a better shopping experience - the jam was used merely as an example - sample data, if you will - for demonstrating the central point that a proliferation of choice counter-intuitively causes less actual purchasing to be done than does an offering of fewer jams.
Jeans. The commenter quite correctly perceives that this is related to the jam. But the choice of product is, again, used to demonstrate that a rise in options has a point of diminishing returns beyond which customer participation decreases. I didn't interpret the article to hold the position that this was better, in any absolute sense, but that the negative experiences the writer describes were his attempt to make sense of, again, the phenomenon where too many choices makes people buy less.
This may be a phenomenon that, while it exists, not everyone experiences - that does not mean that the article is an attack on those people. And I think even people who enjoy as much choice as possible can still find the effect this article describes to be interesting, if only for how it seems inconsistent with what a purely theoretical approach would lead one to expect.
I didn't perceive that the author ever put forth the notion that less choice was better - if that assertion exists, it arises from one possible interpretation of the effect he describes.
These are my readings of the original article, and I share them with you as a perhaps useful guide for escaping the feeling the above comment seems to have, that there is inevitably a single and rather unpleasant attitude the author of the article could have had when creating this piece.
Does she optimize for the best pension for employees, or for the cheapest plan up front?
Or the one who's friendly sales guy took the HR people out to a nice steak dinner.
(Actually kind of how it happens now with 401ks. One big benefit of shifting jobs regularly is that you can rollover your 401k - chosen via the steak dinner method - into an IRA and just buy ETFs.)
>It's an enormous leap however, to get to "therefore having no choice, and expecting shitty outcomes, is the best answer."
Only the article never says that. Low expectations here is not a stand-in for "shitty", it's "don't overthink and overanalyze your jam purchase to get some near absolute best etc".
Why are the bigger stores so popular then? I actually like choosing the product that I think has the best price/quality ratio. I compare prices per unit of weight and everything. In the end I'm satisfied that I made a seemingly rational choice. When there's only one choice I can't help but feel it must be overpriced since there's nothing else to compare it to.
Maybe people just think it's better to have more options?
Also, I once read, that more options aren't necessarily bad.
For example if you can buy a car as diesel or petrol and red or white, but the color doesn't affect the fuel type, it's okay.
But if you could buy a car as diesel or petrol but only the petrol in red or white and the diesel just in white (or a completely different color) this leads to stress, because one decision lets you miss on the other options.
The article reminds me of the superior grocery shopping experience at Trader Joes where they only have one choice in each category. They complement this by having more niche and seasonal items. The physical footprint is much smaller and memorable. Importantly, these details contribute to them being able to predict throughput and optimize the amount of cashiers.
I find the pleasant experience of having a limited choice of quality products at Trader Joe's to be counteracted by the frustration of the tiny, crowded parking lots. Every one I've ever been to has been a mess to park at.
Also Trader Joe's is actually owned by Aldi, in case you didn't know.
Ah. I'm basing my observation on the ones I've been to most frequently in Syracuse and Albany, New York. Both of them seem to always involve a 20 minute parking ordeal. Perhaps it's just me...
Nope, one of the others in San Francisco (on Masonic St.) has the same ridiculous parking ordeal -- At any normal time, the line out of the parking lot blocks a turn lane + one of the traffic lanes onto Masonic Street.
Ah yes, I used to go to that one before I moved out of the city. I seem to recall they had to have someone out in the parking lot directing traffic because the backup was so severe.
Obviously there's an engineer mindset where pulling up a parametric search of RF inductors at an electronic component supplier bringing up over 25K results brings forth a smile and happiness not terror or paralysis. I was thrilled to see over 25K results and with some more parametric searching I found one with a self resonance above 4 GHz and over 100 mA limit and blah blah blah and the GPS preamp ended up working perfectly in the end. It was so comforting seeing 25K results, knowing my project would almost certainly succeed. It certainly extends out of the workplace and into individual life.
Choice paralysis might be a legacy declining way of looking at the world, like nationalism or racism or imperialism are no longer acceptable in the current year's Overton window. Its like people who insist they won't talk to machines or won't use the internet to pay bills or won't learn how to read. Well, get used to choice or become obsolete.
Nationalism is on a global rise, so is imperialism and racism is still healthy attitude towards outsiders worldwide. Seems to me that 6 900 000 000 haven't gotten that memo.
I got a serious case of decision fatigue recently while trying to invest.
(As a note, this means that I am very much NOT soliciting financial advice with this comment. If you want to tell me a different decision I could have made, especially something I considered such as index funds, you are doing the opposite of helping.)
As one of those things you're supposed to do when you realize you're an adult, I decided to automatically invest a portion of my paycheck. There are of course a lot of investment companies who would love to help with that, and first I had to pick one. I picked Merrill Edge because it seemed the easiest to set up the automatic deposit with.
At that point, the site told me: Welcome! You want to invest in a mutual fund, right? Here are EIGHT THOUSAND of them you could choose from. Good news! You can even filter them by 20 different criteria that you would know what they mean if you worked in finance!
All the highest-rated funds of course have statistically indistinguishable rates of return, so there is no real financial basis to make the decision unless I think I'm clever enough to know who is a better fund manager than who, which of course I'm not.
Oh, by the way, they've tried to address the problem. They have a set of "Merrill Edge Select" funds. Of course you get to them in a different interface, you have to choose which jargon-ful category of Select funds you want, and once you do so you still get 20 options in 4 sub-categories.
So I could just make an arbitrary decision, and trust that these products are indistinguishable, right? Not so fast. My first arbitrary choice led me to nearly start an automatic investment in a fund that specifically makes socially conservative, "Biblical" investments, and I found this out by googling the name of the fund at the last minute. Egad.
I have been through a process that was much better than this. It wasn't on the Web, it involved actually walking to an investment bank's storefront. Aside from unavoidable questions about taxes, they asked me two things:
* What year do you plan to retire?
* How much risk can you tolerate?
And then they picked one fund. Take your 8000 choices and shove them, Merrill Edge.
In case I need to say it again: no financial advice please.
Yes, this is one of the effects of the replacement of customer service agents with web interfaces. The same has happened with travel; searching for vacation options nowadays guarantees you access to every possible room in every possible location, ordered by the effectiveness of their SEO strategy. Previously, you used to go through travel agents and tour operators who offered curated selections of hotels. Sure, just like with your financial choices, the selection was potentially compromised - maybe the agents are getting extra commission to promote one hotel or investment plan - but there are other incentives against them completely screwing you (they are interested in recommendations and repeat business after all).
So sure - now we can bypass the agent and get to the raw list of every possible available product; but the cost is an inability to tell meaningless choices from meaningful ones; the risk of making a bad choice is all on us (no opportunity to blame the guy who sold us it); and that combination leads to choice paralysis.
You really should invest in your own personal knowledge of the subject. Going to an investment advisor is a recipe for getting gauged. And this is a really big deal when setting up your plan for retirement. If you are losing small percentage points due to a lazy advisor or the greedy "managed" plan that they set you up with, the effects will be magnified enormously over decades of compound interest. To the tunes of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Serious, everyone should make an effort to get even a basic financial education. It is by far the best investment choice you could make. Relying on "professionals" is unbelievably expensive come your retirement.
That's the rub, isn't it. Financial literacy is as contentious a field as nutrition is[1]. I recently got Tony Robbins' Money: Master the Game [2]. It claims to use both common sense principles and tips from investment masters, and ultimately settles upon pretty reasonable ideas (such as choosing index funds and avoiding mutual funds). Sure, he might be a motivational speaker- but he echoes advice from people in the know, right? Turns out some online investment bloggers do recommend it [3], while others don't [4]. Still others have created a three-hour podcast critiquing it [5].
At some point, one just gives up looking for the best class to take and settles on whatever comes along. To his credit, Robbins did teach me that investment advisors are not to be trusted to keep your best interests in mind- what you should be looking for is a fiduciary.
You see the part about "no financial advice please"?
I listened to people like you for a while. I tried not investing anything until I had spent a bunch of my free time on getting a "basic financial education".
Now that I have a basic financial education, I know that I know nothing, and if I invested based on my own personal knowledge it would be a disaster. I also know from experience that if I try to save that tiny margin from making my own decisions, all the investment banking sites would say "okay, smartass, you're on your own, don't expect anything convenient to ever happen".
And I wish I had just invested first and spent that time learning things that are interesting.
All that time and interest wasted.
Your advice adds to the problem of decision paralysis and it only works for people who are really interested in money.
I love choice and this article seems to ring true for "most people."
Linux is my preferred OS and I hate Apple's structure. I am in the minority.
I also like programming languages were there are several different ways to do things (Looking at R)
People don't like choice they like "Just Works." To me the is "Just Works" means not that important to me or I don't want to know more than the minimum.
I am with you. I hate apple's structure, I'm strictly a linux user. I disagree with both sides of this article when I say that none of this matters, non-choice exists, you can choose not to participate entirely.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.
No doubt Barry Schwartz has never lived without choice. He's wrong, and obviously so. Freedom of choice is vastly superior, in every possible way, to the alternative.
The stories are overly plentiful of people that were held in low-choice captivity in the former USSR, breaking down in tears upon seeing western grocery stores. I know several people who lived under Communism in Romania, their experience was identical. I'd suspect that very few people arguing against choice, have ever lived in a situation where they were actually deprived of it. They're essentially spoiled brats.
I think the key here is the Goldilocks principle: too little or no choice is bad, but so is too much choice. The key (from a marketing perspective) is finding just the right amount of choice that does not overwhelm, but gives a range of varying options. Other commenters have mentioned finding a sweet spot - Apple's x/y axis that leads to four product categories; trimming the number of potato chip options on the rack from 12 to 5 and seeing sales jump.
I remember hearing or reading an article that said that suggested that making a choice/decision was tiring, and it pays to save your strength for important choices. Rather than deliberate over which beverage you are going to drink in the morning. Similarly if you have a standard place for your wallet, watch and keys you can save brain time by not having to search for them.
This is the essence of why we develop habits - it saves our brain power for when we need it during the work day.
It's strange but my wife seems to have an endless supply of this choice-making brain power - she never tires of poring over options, whether it be deciding what to eat or shopping online for shoes. I just want to be done with it as quickly as possible; it's almost physically painful for me to go shopping and be confronted by endless choices.
> Perhaps, Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies. But before you counter with something along the lines of “Why don’t you go and live in North Korea, pinko?” consider this: Paypal founder Peter Thiel argues that monopolies are good things and that competition, often, doesn’t help either businesses or customers. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” Competition, in short, is for losers.
Corbyn is talking about state monopolies while Theil is talking about "monopolies" in air-quotes such as Microsoft from the 1990s or, well, PayPal from roughly the same era. The emergence of PayPal alternatives since the 1990s and the decline & later rejuvenation of Microsoft illustrate the difference.
Yes, a successful business can appeal as a "monopoly," but in a free market, it is rarely an actual monopoly. Apple and other small manufacturers provided alternatives—other choices—even at Microsoft's peak of desktop dominance. I would argue that the highly-successful Apple that we have today was in large part shaped and honed by a decade of fighting for scraps in a market that Microsoft dominated. So if your opinion is that Microsoft was a monopoly in the 1990s, then I think it is reasonable to agree with Theil that monopolies—using that definition—are ultimately a good thing for consumers.
But we should not kid ourselves about matters that can end up being so important to life and happiness: a state monopoly expressly disallows even the smallest and (seemingly) inconsequential alternative choices. State monopolies are definitively not the same thing as Microsoft and PayPal.
I've walked out of restaurants before when there were too many things on the menu. Ethnic restaurants can be forgiven, but an American restaurant that does this gives the impression that they do none of the dishes well.
This is exactly why we end up angry when we try to select a movie to watch on Netflix (and why we end up not watching any!). And also why companies like MUBI are curating (offering) only 30 movies at any given day.
Tesco seems to have overdone it, which has to be running up their inventory costs. That's just a Tesco thing; they're so big that they can't get out of their own way. Safeway in the US may have three or four choices for something, but not 20.
Decision paralysis is amusing in kids. I've seen little kids totally freeze up when faced with all the topping options at the frozen yogurt store. It's kind of cute, except that they're holding up the line.
Buying decisions can have so many confounding variables (emotion, status, cost, quality) this article draws some very loose conclusions on relatively little data. Less choice can be an interesting A/B test for a business, but I wouldn't be surprised if results feel more random than this article suggests.
We can all reduce our choices upfront, but it seems rare that we let other people explicitly curate our lives.
Would anyone here let me for example, set their weekly menu, choose their lunchtime gym sessions, restrict their Netflix choices to my favourite films?
Would you basically let me curate your lifestyle? For a fee?
Still too much choice and still I have to decide am I going to choose the NYT, the good housekeeping, the Jamie Oliver, the xyz diet.
Still too much choice - much easier to give up a huge chunk of it to someone else - especially in days of online ordering where I just don't have to do anything like go get the ingredients
I think the amalgamated curation and default ordering seems ... Interesting
It's not unusual for people to delegate these choices, especially the "menu" and "TV", to a member of their family, when the choice-outcome applies to the whole family and not just the individual.
Some boardgamers know this as "analysis paralysis", and for such individuals it often points us towards games that have fewer, grander choices as opposed to a thousand minor choices that add up to a grand choice.
I tend to agree in a wider sense (knowing that I could live basically anywhere in the world, for example, makes life seem short and that's stressful).
But the supermarket example doesn't work for me at all.
Bottled water? Cheapest price tag, done. It's water. Most items can be reduced to this (tinned beans, frozen vegetables, etc) because it's inconsequential to me.
Big ticket items like a laptop or a car - sure, that's a decision I'll have to live with for a long time, so it makes sense for me to think long and hard.
I could explain it as "More choices increases possibility space and in turn increases effort required to make a decision. And incomplete consideration leaves the feeling that you may have made not the most optimal decision, and both cases increases stress."
I am surprised Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been mentioned yet. He dresses in the same style clothes every day. His reason? It's one less thing he has to decide upon during his day.
‘You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits’ [Obama] said.
‘I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions.
I've been in the fast food business for 30 years (an investment). When I bought someone else's failing location, one of the first things I noticed was that his chip rack had 12 varieties to choose from. One of the first things I did was reduce that choice to the five best selling items.
Weekly inventory showed how much of each item we sold. The previous owner would keep in stock things that might only have a few purchased per week. His excuse was only to have variety.
Before Steve Jobs returned in the late 90s, Apple's Mac range was a hot mess. Apple was trying to compete with the entire range of PC manufacturers, so in addition to licensed third-party Mac clones, they were making multiple ranges of desktop Mac with overlapping specs, on the principle that they could occupy one shelf slot per machine in Fry's or Target with each model. So you had the Centris, the Performa, and the Quadra ranges, with high, middle, and low end machines in each range, educational and professional media authoring variants, and the powerbook range ...
Jobs returned and priority #1 was to staunch the cash haemorrhage. Rationalizing the product range and supply chain was a huge part of this. So he drew a simple diagram. X-axis: consumer and professional. Y-axis: desktop and portable. Four models would occupy the entire grid, with roughly three specification levels in each (think Goldilocks and the Three Bears). This gave us the iBook and iMac machines (consumer), and the Powerbook and Mac Pro machines (professional), with differentiation based on CPU speed/memory/disk capacity within each cell.
This made the choice of which machine to buy vastly easier on the customer; it was glaringly obvious which model you wanted, all you had to do was decide how much speed/memory/disk capacity you needed, and that was it, rather than trying to figure out what the difference was between a Centris 630 and a Quadra 630AV (hint: RGB video out, 10MHz, and about $250) and so on ...
This turned the precipitous decline in Mac sales around. It took years to build up to the current powerhouse, but it staunched the arterial bleeding -- and all by giving the customers less choice, not more.