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Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out? (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the decades following World War 2, there was a dramatic expansion in choices for consumers. Where before there were only a few brands of bread, now there were dozens. Marketers were relentless in trying to fill every niche, to capture every last market segment. But in the 1990s and 2000s, we started to realize that this wasn't inherently a good thing. Choice paralysis demonstrably exists. It's made us start asking questions like: do we really need 30 types of jam on a store shelf? Is there a good reason for a firm to offer over 150 different pension plans? It turns out, no. Employees are much less likely to actually choose a plan when confronted with so many. In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who helped bring this idea to the fore, has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."
Relentless growth relies on a large subset of the buying public being able to make poor decisions on what to buy, then having to replace that item shortly thereafter. This choice reduction seems like some commie nonsense to me.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Choice getting you down? Are you paralyzed by the array of different breads available at the store? Well have I got the solution for you, friend: Bread Lines! Everyone waits in one long line, and you get handed bread. "What kind?" you ask? Sometimes it's rye, sometimes it's pumpernickel, sometimes it's nothing at all! The important thing is you don't have to worry. Let the State worry for you.
Often, it seems what they really need is an informed third party to assist them in whittling down their options to a manageable choice threshold.
Looking at you America: 30 types of jam, 60 fragrances of febreze, and still two political parties... See? They're keeping it simple for us.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...but Mozilla is working hard to change that...
Whenever we don't have many choice, for example: High Speed Internet and Cable TV, is a virtual monopoly or duopoly.
We get gouged on pricing, and shoddy service.
And then you develop what's called a "preference". There's also this social thing called "word of mouth" that you can use to communicate benefits. Also, stores/shops usually carry a selection, not a complete catalog of everything on the planet.
Choice is good, and the good news is you're not locked in. If you don't like it, you can try again the next time, and maybe even get a reimbursement from a quality guarantee, many products have this. If you just don't have the time to get informed and need to make a rush decision, there are even many review sites that offer a meta score and you can just pick something from the top of the list and get a quick bluirb that will give you a bearing.
Or just go with your gut.
Twinstiq, game news
Personally, I can get by just fine with three choices in jam.
Most everyone I know can manage with three to four choices in jam.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices!
So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Ditto bread, meat, veggies, soap, shampoo, etc.
IOW, a large number of choices isn't a bad thing. Unless you're just too stupid to be allowed to make choices in the first place....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is a HUGE difference between "30 types of jam" and "over 150 different pension plans".
At the most basic level, you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one.
With a pension plan you won't really know until it is too late and you won't have any option.
Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
Well, duh. This is kind of the entire design philosophy of Apple: a few understandable choices, not endless suggestions. It is the foundation-stone of thousands of flamewars on Slashdot about this approach vs providing more options for power-users.
...In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing....
What is "accidental" and "worst" about picking nothing. To me that means that the person didn't really want/need the item in the first place, and the plethora of choices led the person to make the correct choice, ie., nothing.
The basic example argument here is that having a choice of 150 pension plans and not choosing any is bad?
Except ... when the company providing those plans fails and takes all your money with it ... in which case, picking any plan BUT none, is a bad idea.
Your pension plan example is a prime one for me to pick apart because of the shear number of companies that fail leaving their customers screwed out of large sums of money.
Choice paralysis is not because there are too many choices, its because people don't give a shit. Too many choices just exaggerates the problem, but it doesn't create it.
Current generations are spoiled brats who expect someone else to make all the choices for them. They are exactly the drones that the governments want to control, unquestioning morons who follow whatever advice their elders give them, or someone else decides.
But hey, go ahead and pick some other bullshit reason for it happening instead of focusing on the actual problem: We're raising a bunch of kids who can't be bothered to take care of their own responsibilities.
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I have this friend that believes he'll never be disappointed if he just thinks the worst is going to happen at any given moment. Cynical as fuck but swears he is constantly pleasantly surprised. This just sounds like a fucked up way to live. Imagine the fear that must rule you if you need to go around expecting the lowest lows in order to be happy.
I don't think low expectations are the way to go, personally. Maybe don't expect anything at all either way. Stop trying to predict and frame everything. Stop managing your expectations altogether and just live in the moment. Focus on what you're doing now and try to get the most out of it. If you're letting bad jam bring you down then you need to step back and calm down. Forget the jam and read a book or start a new hobby.
Twinstiq, game news
Small town life supports his argument. With fewer choices, you know them all well, don't worry you're missing options, and are reasonably certain no new options will appear after you make a decision. Result contentment.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the One True Linux to free me from the burden of too many choices. Stop letting me decide what is right for me, what best fits my needs; just give me the final solution.
has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."
Fuck that and fuck you. That attitude has given us Gnome3 and systemd. Not everyone fits into the same mold.
When I was kid in the 70s and 80s, there was regular shampoo. Or, if you had money, you could buy the expensive "Pantene" shampoo.
Today, when you go to the store, they have an entire shelf dedicated to Pantene shampoos. The Pantene website lists no less than 25 different shampoos. Anti-breakage. Colour-preserve. Heat-shield. Sheer volume. Damage Detox Deep Cleanse Purifying Shampoo.
The actual differences between the formulas must be soooo tiny. Maybe no difference at all.
And then add another 15 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioners on top of that.
I think it's more that over 90% of the products don't meet our needs. In the case of jam, I would love to find one with reduced sugar - but not with fake sugar! Good luck finding that. In my experience with food shopping I largely find most products don't suit my needs nor expectations.
Freedom is indeed slavery.
This was my Mantra even before I was married, 30+ years ago. Take holidays. My wife has this Disney-esque image of how it will be. Mine is more like a bad, indie short. I am never disappointed or surprised.
The biggest problem is choosing the right video for play time. A task that used to take mere minutes can now take up to hours. Damn you internet. Captcha: puberty
is reasonable expectations... but i'm no psychologist so no-one will consider it...
Your post contains the letters "r","a","p" and "e" which just triggered me again.
Please refrain from such microaggressions in the future!!!
Alvin Toffler wrote about "overchoice" in his 1970's book Future Shock. I guess no one read it.
...and as soon as I turned it on, I realized that I not only had 200 cable channels to chose before, but now I also have on demand content that would fill a lifetime in front of tv only for my top 3 genres. Then I remembered they have a great recommendation engine that will feed me the best of what I really like, giving me some comfort, and saving me that lifetime.
Bottomline is: we shouldn't worry with too much choice - we should worry about the quality of the choices we have, and the quality of the choices MADE FOR US, that don't originate in ourselves. Having few choice is a subset of the environment making a choice for you, the only option left being to accept or not that choice (chosing "nothing" as the OP says). This curation has been the past, present and will stay the future basis of human society as a whole: it is, for example, what a government does for you after you elect it, or what newspaper editors, television/radio programming managers' work is all about. This article states choosing nothing is the worst choice and a consequence of having a lot of choices (only partially true, i.e. a BAD ASSUMPTION). I say having a lot of choices with different characteristics makes you chose "nothing" a lot more easier (because you value things by what they are rather than everybody using them), which is always good when you consider you have limited time in this earth to make use of your life choices. One obvious case of when this is bad, for example, for companies, is when your business model is based on using something rather than paying for the curation itself. Competition is the best thing about capitalism. It is the essence of freedom applied to organizations. But I believe if there's something clearly valuable by itself, it will always stand out, reducing this problem to peanuts.
This is the best explanation of how wives and husbands view holidays I've ever seen. Your sentiment and explanation gives words to how I've felt for years. My wife thinks I'm insensitive and don't care. Nothing could be further from the truth, but she grew up in one state and I grew up traveling the world. I'm jaded. What can I say. It takes more than the usual to get me to sit up and take notice.
Thank you for your great comment.
The 100+ jams are likely made by a handful of oligopoly food companies.
The 100+ retirement plans are likely all investment schemes tied to the same market & macro environments.
Have you had those choices to begin with?
yes, absolutely!
This was news way back in 2007:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM
Uploaded on Jan 16, 2007
http://www.ted.com 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.
I've know about "decision fatigue" for years, and like Steve Jobs and others, I do my best to not worry about the small, inconsequential things like clothing, food, shampoo, etc.
What I've done:
- All my jeans are 501s because they fit me best
- All my trainers are black and grey Asics
- All of my shirts are Nautica button-down slim fit longsleeves (rolled up in summer)
- I buy the same Suave 2-in1 shampoo/conditioner
- I buy the same Old Spice Fresh anti-persperant
- All of my socks are black Champion socks from Walmart
- All of my skivvies are Hanes grey tagless
Needless to say, I never worry about my clothes feeling ill fitting. I look different every day, but the fit is identical and comforting, allowing me to never think of it and worry about solving problems.
Anything else doesn't get my attention.
"The secret to happiness is low expectations."
That should be a bumper sticker. O_o
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
It is not the amount of choice that is freaking us out, it is the amount of effort to get to know what the choice actually is and how to get it. Especially due to capitalism, full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customers. Nowadays, you can have a full-time job managing a company's software licenses. And the bigger the manufacturer, the less sense the license model has.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Futureshock (that's the title of a book millennials) came out in 1970. In the book it was called overchoice. So this is nothing new and has been discussed since at least 1970. But millennials think their every thought is completely new and original. Maybe I should write a book about that and coin a word like Cryptomnesia.
"The secret to happiness is low expectations."
AKA "shut up and be happy with whatever we give you"
If you only make a single choice (and then simply stick with the choice), then your choice is basically arbitrary and defeats the purpose of having a wide variety of options. That's one of the arguments in the article: more choices aren't always better.
Word of mouth is also useless if others are making arbitrary choices and then simply sticking with them. It reminds me of a comic's (forget who) routine about getting advice on traveling. People who had been to a city once and only eaten at one restaurant would heartily recommend the restaurant even though they had no baseline for comparison. ("Yeah, I know this great restaurant in Toledo!")
Now, maybe you're making the argument that you only have to go through the process of choosing once (which will involve testing more than one selection), but few people do that. Mostly, they do what they decide above and just try a variety or two, say meh, and arbitrarily stick with their choice. How many varieties of peanut butter have most people tried? I'm guessing that mostly people have tried a smooth and a chunky (and maybe a natural), but I doubt many people have really compared brands. Why do "choosy moms choose JIF"? (Their advertising slogan.) Because moms have enough shit to do, so at one point in the past, they grabbed a jar of JIF and then just keep getting it because why not?
Arbitrary choices are not a good solution.
I think a big factor here is whether the choice relates to a luxury or a necessity. And to be clear, I'm going to stretch the definition of "necessity" slightly, to include things such as pension plans. In fact, the words "luxury" and "necessity" aren't really quite the right ones here, but I can't think of better ones.
When it comes to necessities, what we generally want is security. We want to find something that works for us fairly quickly and to then have the mental security that comes from being able to stick with it. This is why so few people switch banks or utility providers, even though they could often save money by doing so. Being bombarded with options when buying something you need (rather than something you want) is stressful. You'll be likely to fixate more on the downsides of making the wrong choice rather than the upsides of making the right choice.
When it comes to luxuries, on the other hand, we tend to like choice. If we can afford high end food products, we like to be able to choose from lots of different varieties. If we're buying a luxury car, we want to be able to pick and choose options. Having choices makes us excited about our shiny new purchase.
The complicating factor here is that the line between necessities and luxuries isn't static and won't be the same for everybody. If you have a lot of disposable income, you will probably approach your food-shop as though you're shopping for luxuries. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you will be firmly in necessity mode (I've been in both camps).
It's not even all about income. I can illustrate this with a comparison between myself and my mother. We both actually have fairly similar levels of disposable income, but our interests and priorities are very different.
I'm a big PC user; I enjoy gaming on a high end PC. I bought a full new PC recently. Deciding I couldn't be bothered with a self-build this time, I looked around for UK-based vendors who would allow me to customise my build extensively before they put it together. I took time to do my research, picked out the case, the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card and all the rest. And yes, I quite enjoyed this. I chose the vendor I did largely because they offered me this degree of control, rather than an off the peg system.
My mother, by contrast, does not like PCs. She needs one, but she doesn't like that fact and doesn't treat it as anything more than a tool. When her old laptop died and she needed a replacement, she found the degree of choice available first confusing and then infuriating. We eventually solved it after I looked around for 3 acceptable options and narrowed the choice down to those for her ("this one costs a bit more but has a bigger screen, that one costs a bit less but might be a bit slow to start up").
Flip things around to the last time we bought new sofas; I spent an afternoon browsing online for something that was about the right size, reasonably cheap and not a horrible colour clash for my living room. My mother spent a month and a half of weekends walking around show-rooms and comparing textile samples.
We each believe that the other is completely mad. But what it really comes down to is a value judgement over "luxury" vs "necessity" and how that impacts on your approach to choice.
Yes, it is absolutely true that too much choice is a problem. Apple's success is a clear example of this. They offer minimal choices. You are expected to take what they give you and not try to find just the right tweaks for you. It is a very delicate balance. We need expert engineers to make the best choices for us in many cases, but that quickly slides into corporations controlling individuals and customers rebel. If you really know better than the customers what is good for them, and they regularly find that trusting you is in their best interest. Then by all means, reduce choice. But most marketers are trying to sell things that are not made with the consideration of the customers or the environment. What we need is more choices among suppliers so that we can find some suppliers who are actually looking out for customer interests.
The choice between strawberry or raspberry jam isn't stressing, it's good that it exists.
What's stressful is to make choices that can have a severe economic impact - especially when pushed to to the choices with a short time limit, which often telemarketers play on.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Making reasonable, well-informed choices is vital problem-solving skill. Managing the psychological stress in the face of information overload/ambiguity/distraction/etc, is a vital life skill. You are fully responsible for developing your own skills. If you failed at this, you deserve the consequences.
Bunch of losing whiners.
This is bullshit! If there are too much choices then why can't I find the smartphone I want?
I want second tier to flagship quality hardware, because I'm cheap.
I want reliability over having the very latest hardware.
I want a fully open source OS that gives me lots of options and the ability to add my own, including the ability to install security updates on my own! This also requires fully open source drivers.
I want a microSD card slot for all the stuff that doesn't need expensive high performance flash, and that I can take with me to a new phone when I upgrade.
The battery doesn't have to be quickly swappable, but it should be reasonably easy to replace since batteries wear out well before the rest of the phone.
There is nothing technically difficult about what I am asking for so why doesn't this phone exist?
Of course, if I wanted to shoot for the moon I would want a phone with a separate swappable radio so that the hardware could be completely independent of any carrier.
I like having 100s of choices as long as I have tool(s) to help me narrow down the choice and it is not some pain to compare the choices. At newegg for instance I can easily narrow down the choice of computer cases from over 1000 choices down to 20 or so based on what I want. At Amazon however i would never be able to accomplish that with such ease. I know in a lot of ways this is not the same as walking down an isle of 30 types of jam but in many aspects it is. I could easily narrow those 30 jams down to a few and from there pick one based on whatever criteria I wanted, if there was a nice system for doing so.
s/©//g
30 years of outsourcing and declining wages is stressing us out. A race to the bottom where everybody takes a piece of you on the way down is stressing us out. Having to pick a breakfast cereal? Not so much. This doesn't even qualify as a "first world problem". Next question please.
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Yes, you need 30 jams, probably more. Let's start out with the basics, normally you'll find 4 choices of any product: Cheap, Mid-Range, High-End, and (for food) Organic (replace this with Exotic for non-food items).
Now, with jam, you have flavours, and most customers have many flavours they will outright reject. Let's think of some common ones: Grape, Strawberry, Raspberry, Blueberry, Marmalade. Throw in a couple of fun/seasonal flavours: Peach, blackberry, lime.
That's 32 jams already. But only an idiot consumer has a problem with this. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature goes to the jam aisle with a flavour in mind. Personally, I like strawberry. I have a look at my (now) 4 choices. I consider my budget: I'm almost broke. I pick up the cheap strawberry jam. Done.
Mind you, I've never seen "30 types of jam". I'd be surprised if you could even find that except in a specialty store. Most large grocery chains have highly limited contracts with just a few key suppliers (for a specific commodity) who then offer a few varieties. You could argue there's too little choice when you're forced to buy American produce from Canadian grocery stores. You know, the shitty kind that's been in cold storage for a year then gassed and god knows what else.
Is it or isn't it? I don't want to choose just tell me what to believe!
I live in three different countries (yes, I'm lucky). When I spend time in France I have the hardest time adjusting to their food. The french diet is plain awful and Paris must be the most expensive place on earth.
I actually would love more options when I do grocery, not 30 times a variation of the very same piece of cheese/bread/pork/whatever. Which pretty much is what "too much choice" actually is.
It's not about having an abundance of choices. I find that none of the choices is what I want.
>> Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who helped bring this idea to the fore, has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."
C'mon, "Barry" we know who you really are.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices! So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Have you really tried all 100 typed of jam and optimized to just 3-4? Have the other jam shoppers?
It's indisputable that there are too many choice of jelly, because some are basically identical jellies with different labels. Smucker's grape jelly/slime is functionally identical to the store brand grape jelly/slime. Hell, maybe they're even made in the same place. I've found the same with a variety of jams, jellies, and fruit preserves. A grocery store I often go to started carrying a (surprisingly good) store-branded line of organic jams/fruit preserves, and they taste the same as some of the name brands. Again, they may even be the same in the same plant.
If the store really has 100 choices of jam, then I find it hard to believe that you have truly narrowed it down to 3-4. Unless you're a taste savant, your taste memory simply isn't that good, and your preferences will have changed somewhat by the time you sampled enough of them to make a call. (God, I just tried 20 strawberry jams, and now I can't stand strawberry jam!) I'm guessing there are a bunch of jams that you'd be equally happy with, but you've simply found 3-4 of them and stuck with that because sampling all 100 is too much of a chore.
As for me, I've tried a lot of jams and fruit preserves at my local super market. (I don't really like jellies.) I'm happy with a lot of them, and like I said, many can only be differentiated in a careful side-by-side comparison. I've tried because I am familiar with the paradox of choice (not a new idea -- Barry Schwartz's book came out in 2004), so I made a deliberate effort to see what I'm missing. The answer: we're often choosing between indistinguishable choices. I'd loose very little if the store cut down the number of choices. (Unless they decide to cut the cheap brands, which would suck.)
Side note: a lot of people are likening a lack of choice to communism, but we're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't really rational and adjusting their stocks in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest.
So THAT'S why my wife is so happy. She has low expectations ... and I manage to live down to them on a daily basis.
Go me!
I get stressed out when I don't have ENOUGH choices. For instance, If I want Internet at home, I can use The Phone Company or the Cable company. THAT'S IT!
I have issues with both of them, so I need MORE choices that are reasonable.
...and the final quote: "The secret to happiness is low expectations." explains the reason behind most recent changes to school education.
Maybe it is.
Or not.
Aaaaa... I can't stand it anymore!
Toothpaste is the worst example. Just make one that does EVERYTHING. Why would or should I have to choose between various combinations of gum protection, tartar control, whitening, breath freshening, microcrystals, etc. Just make ONE that does it all and cut the bullshit.
The choice between strawberry or raspberry jam isn't stressing, it's good that it exists.
Except this isn't about choosing between multiple flavors of jam, it's about choosing between multiple brands of jam for the same flavor. I would still agree that, in the case of jam, choice is good. I am simply saying that your example is flawed.
You have a Choice to enjoy more choices or fewer choices
Don't like choosing between 57 different kinds of Ketchup? Shop at the local Quickiemart, which will likely have just one.
Isn't Choice Great?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't totally rational (surprise!) and adjusting their offerings in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest. In short, just because we're in a free-market economy doesn't mean everything is already optimized. Optimization is a continuous process, and just because it means fewer choices doesn't mean it's communism.
Love the nod to Indiana Jones... good one!
this post is appalling. Lazily scribed with terrible grammar - someone was in a rush? Or, was it just the Guardians' fabled awful sub-editing? I don't pretend to be any better, but then, it's not my job.
On the other hand, it's a healthy topic. 'Choice' is not always equal to 'freedom', especially on the fringes of relevance.
The idea is that there is an optimum amount of choice: we definitely need choices, but there is such a thing as too much choice. This shouldn't be a surprise: there's an optimal amount of everything, and the optimal amount is usually finite.
So yes, we need more choices in high speed internet. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to have too many choices; it's just hard to imagine since we're used to having too few.
I wanted to read the entire article but couldn't decide whether to read it on my desktop, laptop, ultrabook, tablet, smartphone or smartwatch.
There is a documentary on Costco that delves into this phenomenon. Choice paralysis is a thing, and that is why there are few choices amongst product categories available at Costco.
When you start talking about problems such as the company offering 100 pension plans? Your problem isn't that the employee has too many options/choices. The problem is that the company didn't do enough homework of their own to weed out the inferior options. When my employer tells me they made a certain selection for our healthcare provider, our life insurance provider, or anything else related to the benefits offered -- I assume they made an effort to find the best possible value for the dollar spent. Maybe they could have chosen better than they did, and maybe not. But the point is, they tried to apply a "filter" and make a sensible decision. (Why wouldn't you, since you want your benefits package to look attractive compared with your competition?)
Every time we use the web, we're presented with literally hundreds of millions of "options" ... yet we're not overwhelmed to the point where we just give up trying to find content we need. That's because we have really powerful search engines like Google we use as part of the process. They act as our filters.
Paraphrasing: "Your car can be in any color you want, as long as its black."
The problem isn't a choice of what to buy, the problem is the choice of what information source to rely on to make the purchasing decision.
I remember reading an interview with users of tinder and other online dating services. All of them claimed the same. The more choices they have to stabilize a relationship with someone, the less chances that this is gonna happen. The reason is that even after meeting with someone and after even probing that he/she is a good candidate, nobody can be sure because the queue for new candidates is never gets empty, and there is always the idea of trying the next one.
A couple years ago - I stumbled on this. Seems very relevant to the discussion.
A computer scientist is someone who, when told to Go to Hell sees the "go to" rather than the destination, as harmful.
A Korea (I know it's the wrong Korea, but it's still a Korea) needs to build farms to increase their military. It's like a real life Warcraft game.
I wonder if one of his advisers popped up and said "Need more farms".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
My Walmart has a back shelf with 10ft of Pringles flavors. They still don't have bacon flavored Pringles, fucking commies.
Self-serving crap science posted on self-serving crap sensationalist website. Gosh, what a big surprise that is.
China and the Soviet Union are not, were not and never were Communist. They were fascist dictatorships that happen to borrow rhetoric from popularists like Karl Marx. Jeez, it's 2015. Do we still believe in McCarthyism? Maybe if it weighed the same as a duck...
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you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one... Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
But many people DO have trouble picking a jar of jam. From TFA:
In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
I think part of the problem is confusing "not wrong" and "optimized". Yes, you know when you dislike a jam, but excluding bad jams doesn't mean you've optimized your choice. Most people probably find a few jams that "aren't bad" and stick with them (sampling only a few jams along the way), which defeats the purpose of having 30 types of jam: if the selection were 15 types of jam, then you'd still find a few jams that "aren't bad" and you'd be in about the same boat.
The more types of jam you try, the better you can optimize. A larger selection doesn't mean better optimization per se: having more options doesn't help if you don't try them. Optimizing 30 types of jam is daunting, so maybe you try 5 before finding a few that are "not bad" and stopping the optimization process. Optimizing 10 types of jam is less daunting, so maybe you'd try all 10 -- meaning you are likely to have done a _better_ job optimizing. That's the idea here. The problem described above isn't rational, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
There is too many choices being offered, especially when it comes to Presidential candidates from a major party. Come on, guys. Get your act together.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
The secret to happiness is no expectations.
Happiness, like anger is at one end of a spectrum, I found for myself that seeking a balance in my life leads to a sort of peace, a low level satisfaction.
It's hard for me to express but you know it when you feel, it's a "everything is fine this moment" feeling, not the swing out to happiness but in a lot of ways much better because it's sustainable.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You still have made a choice.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
This is why freemarket capitalism fails so hard at so many things.
If the requirement is that all people have to be intelligent, rational, self-interested actors who will
Sorry, had to stop laughing for a moment there :)
We don't have the TIME or the attention to do all the research. We can't inspect our own meat, or look up the chemical composition of stuff used in our workplaces that is just 'mysterious solvent' to us so that we can determine it's not a safe chemical exposure and seek other employment, thus penalizing the company that's trying to use dangerous solvents.
Even when we CAN get information, we're only human and simply can't investigate every little corner of reality in order to come to personal, self-interested and rational decisions about all things. As Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black put it, we're dumb panicky animals and you know it. The times that we can think and commmunicate and learn are special times, to be celebrated. On the whole, we need training wheels.
Of course too much choice is stressing us out. Modern culture is predicated upon dumping ALL the choices on us, as an explicit political system.
The opposite extreme is just as lame and nobody wants gray Communist food depots serving government cheese, but it's important to recognize how wacky we've let things become. We could deal with 500 kinds of jam if every detail of our employment, survival, safety etc. wasn't also left up to our so-impressive self-reliance as a sort of econo-religious tenet.
Future Shockshock (Alvin Toffler, 1970) observed that change is stressful, accelerating rapidly in our time, and sure to get worse.
Get worse it has. Change continues to accelerate, fulfilling Toffler's predictions.
John Brunner's excellent novel The Shockwave Rider (1975) puts it well:
There's the rub: change will accelerate until it approximates the limit of what human beings can endure.
Those who cannot endure? They kill themselves, or others, or go insane.
Sources:
-kgj
This is one of the reasons Costco is successful. You let them 'curate' by picking a subset of items they like and can get a good discount on. It's very well known to them that the paralysis mentioned leads to a more stressful shopping experience for shoppers, less selection => less stress. If you don't like that model, there are other stores eager to help.
H.
While it is idiotic to have more than a few choices for a particular product (corn flakes, Grape Jelly, etc) on a single store shelf having multiple companies competing against each other is a good thing. In their attempts to get greater market share above each other presses prices down and quality up. Stores do limit their product selections, which is why you see some brands on one stores shelfs but not on another, but some of the larger chains have let things get a bit too far in some categories. For people annoyed with too much choice there are stores that cater towards providing a limited selection at the lowest price (Aldi/Dollar General in my area).
I also like software that has at least 50 tabs on the menu bar and the choices are nested 5 levels deep. Life is so much easier when it takes you 50 hours to customize every preference. It's even more fun when they give you at least 3 different ways to set the same option.
Still a non-problem.
Try on brand on Monday. Try another brand on Tuesday. Try another on Wednesday. Or not even bother.
It's not some great tragedy.
If you think that 3 brands of grape jam to choose from is something to get stressed over, you have a remarkably sheltered and shallow existence.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Many choices avoids the problem of corrupting the decider by concentrated bribery. Few choices runs the risk of leaving people to fall prey to their own ignorance or to manipulative advertisement.
If you have too few, then the person who makes the choice initially is the only one you have to corrupt. With retirement plans, for example, this can be a problem--a skilled retirement planner will make much better decisions than your average employee, but historically there are also significant conflicts of interest where they choose funds they get a higher commission on, and the like.
I agree with that. You're going to have a lot more choice paralysis if you're in the market for a laptop. Make the wrong choice and the GPU overheats and unsolders itself. More expensive isn't any safer.
Communism doesn't work. It involves a large scale transfer of ownership of the means of production to the working class, and it's been shown that in the battle between the military and ruling class that ensues when you try to do that it all falls apart.
This folks is why I'm a Democratic Socialist. You can live however the heck you want so long as you're not causing pain and suffering to others. Trouble is the 1% will _always_ cause pain and suffering, because as you and I are diminished they are raised. It really is a Zero sum game, but for social status and political power rather than raw economics.
Nice talking points you got there though. Did you get 'em from Rush Limbaugh? You know he just got 'em from Karl Rove right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Let me weigh in on the Cult of Less. Which, by the way, is the right way to handle things in a post-scarcity economy we're moving in to.
I ...
- buy jeans at the vintage clothes store or dirt-cheap no-name brand. Buy 2-3 once every 2 years or so.
- buy Longsleves and T-Shirts either from H&M (worse choice, but available) or Contintental
- buy once kind of PH-neutral soap for the household. Do my dishwashing, cleaning and moping with just that. In a pinch I can even shower with it and use it as shampoo (no joke).
- only use bars of soap. For showering, washing, etc. Saves packaging (no plastic bottles) and gives a wide variety. Plus I know what to shop for when luxury shopping. And people can always give me a bar of nice soap if they don't know what they can give me for a present.
- I, as a computer expert, *do* have too many computers. A now broken Mac Mini, two refurbished Lenovo ThinkPads, a 13" MB Air, a 10" Lenovo Yoga Tablet, a Smartphone, a Xbox 360 (latest model), a Nintendo DSi, a PSP and a Pocket Computer from the mid-80ies. At least two of those I could and should easyly get rid of. Note that most of these are portable.
- I live in a 36 square-meter one-room apartment. It's just my size. It takes 2 hours max. to clean up everything and I have a good reason to curb my accumilation of stuff
- I only use and learn FOSS technologies. There are still to many of those, but it reduces my field I watch out for a little bit.
Bottom line:
Decision fatigue is very real and I've experienced first hand how relaxing it can be when you actively reduce your options.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Costco does not offer you a lot of choices. Want paper towels? You have two choices, a leading brand or the store brand. Same with toilet paper. Need a vacuum cleaner? There are maybe three to choose from. Jam? One brand, maybe two flavors plus some high-end organic stuff. Pop Tarts? One box, with two mixed flavors.
This model seems to work well for them.
I am a technical person and my head spins when I shop for a laptop. It's no wonder people just go for the brand they know at the price they are comfortable with and hope for the best.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Try on brand on Monday. Try another brand on Tuesday. Try another on Wednesday.
Or let others do that for you: Just go to Amazon, and buy the brand with five star reviews.
1 the cheap economy choice
2 the standard regular choice
3 the deluxe top notch choice
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out?
Yes.... ....
I mean No
oh HELL I can't decide, why are you asking me?
This is probably my #3 reason for sticking with a Desktop. Build my own and it's my own fault if it doesn't work, but then it's only one part that has to be swapped.
In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This reminds me of when I explain to people my idea around how to change the system to have voters vote on issues instead of individuals for deciding who our politicians should be, and I have plenty of people say "But I don't care about the issues". It's heartbreaking.
Always nice to see another Rush fan...
You don't need choices, citizen. Lower your expectations!
CISA rammed through. TPP... who the fuck knows. Might be ratified already and nobody has the actual text of the agreement. TTIP and TISA will be rammed through as well.
You'll be happy this way, citizen! We have research. Accept it, citizen. You don't want to be a Luddite, do you?
Truest thing I've ever read on slashdot.
It will of course be misunderstood by most people here as meaning you shouldn't raise your eyes above the gutter.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
In my case it is not the excess of choices that bothers me. What worries me is the fact that out of a hundred options I have, in 80 of them will try to cheat me.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
[no further comment necessary]
The Paradox Of Choice is excellent. The most important point among a legion of somewhat unexpected findings is: people generally make choices either by optimizing and finding the best choice, or by setting a threshold and choosing the first option that exceeds that threshold. The people who generally use optimization strategies consistently make better choices than the people who set thresholds, but are consistently much less happy about both their choices and their lives. This appears to be because in the process of optimizing, they calculate the cost of all the choices they didn't make, in a sort of buyer's remorse, and that has a huge impact on their satisfaction with the choice they did make.
He spends a lot of time talking about how you can make good choices and be happy about them. One of the main ways of doing this is figuring out ways to reduce the number of apparent choices you have, so that the cost of the paths not taken is lower.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customer
Said a different way, products descriptions are misleading as to their contents and what was done to offer them in some ideal format (long shelf life, inexpensive, type of flavor). So you end up with an array of products that are the same thing with different meaningless labels.
My suggestion is rather than reducing choice, if you're not absolutely thrilled with one brand of product, try a different one next time. Going to bred, there is one brand of bread at the grocery store that (for my needs) far surpasses the others. Of course it's almost always sold out, because we all know this to be true. But it's not the healthiest brand by far, and probably is one of hte least authentic. But if authenticity is what you crave, there are like 6 choices for that too.
The only people who seem to benefit from lack of choice are shareholders who want to own really big companies with absolutely no threat from competition.
We do need 30 types of jam. Some weeks are more cherry jam weeks and others are more habanero apricot, etc.
I don't like having to think.
Seriously though, as far as tech is concerned the problem of "too many languages" causes so much grief it's unbelievable. The compatibility matrix is so huge that choosing a correct solution is impossible. Choosing an optimal solution is very nearly impossible. Instead we go with a botch of bandaided and cobbled together solutions and random bits of interop and SWIG to make things kinda-sorta-maybe work. Failing everything else you can always commission another computer and stick a random bit of network RPC on it to kinda-sorta-maybe make it talk to other kinda-sorta-maybe working bits. Then everyone complains when someone switches the second computer off to plug in a vacuum cleaner.
So I wouldn't say it's the choice that's stressing us out - choosing is easy. The problems come from the realization that we've made bad choices because we can't possibly hope to make good ones anymore.
Switching back to Jim Beam white label
In and Out has stayed with just a few menu items done well, while McDonalds explodes into several dozen. Franchise owners complained about all the choices, especially brought on by all day breakfasts. Recently it has increased McDonalds sales, but we'll see what the market says in the long run.
Keep your millenial, reddity, douche words off of slash please.
When I first started shopping at co-op grocery stores and/or Trader Joes I was shocked at how *small* they were. Surely all grocery stores needed to be cavernous warehouses.
Well, it turns out it takes a lot of shelf space to show you all those choices, which makes it take a lot longer for you to walk around and find what you want.
When you do away with all those false choices of which sticker is on the exact same mash of b-grade berries and corn syrup, you find you can actually do your shopping faster.
In some areas, yes, there are "too many" choices, only in that the differences are immaterial and trivial. The only persistent issues I see are shipping and stocking costs for such a variety and the unlikelihood that the exact thing you might want has been reviewed by more than two people.
I appreciate having the choices. Everyone having the same stuff, eating the same stuff, etc. gets boring. However, this isn't ultimately leading to more and more choices. Eventually, it's leading to more custom manufacturing, 3D printing, and custom mixing of very tailored goods. People will need to learn to see a few samples, imagine what they want, then describe it closely enough to have it made for them onsite, quickly.
Consider the very simple case of house paint. There were a few places like Sherwin-Williams where you could get pretty much any color, but 50 years ago most people shopped at Sears or somewhere similar where you had a few dozen colors to choose from. It took a long time to get it perfected, but now we can easily, affordably, and quickly get any color in the spectrum.
Don't give us less choices, give us complete control over what we can choose.
We were talking with the Master regarding the nature of conceptual reality. Psychologically speaking, the human mind, or brain or whatever, is almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the vividly imagined experience. Sound and film and music and radio. Even these manipulative experiences are received more or less directly and uninterpreted by the mind. They are cataloged and recorded and either acted upon directly, or stored in the memory, or both. Now this process, unless we pay it tremendous attention, begins to separate us from the reality of the now. Am I being clear? For we must allow the reality of the now to just happen, as it happens. Observe and act with clarity. For where there is clarity, there is no choice. And were there is choice, there is misery. But then, why should I speak, since I know nothing?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
"The secret to happiness is low expectations."
This entirely explains slashdot!
The terrible beta. The inability to handle Unicode. The annoying embedded ads, the blatant "product placement" articles, and the atrocious editing of submissions.
They are just trying to set our expectations really really low.
Slashdot just wants us to be happy :-)
If I walk into the gourmet grocery store and see they stock 30+ kinds of jam, I'm happy. I know that I don't like marmalade in general, but I do like whiskey marmalade; so when I see blood orange whiskey marmalade I'll give it a try. If it proves to be a bad choice, it's no big deal.
I'd say satisfaction with choice is mostly a function of the effort you need to make what you feel is a good enough choice. If you walk into the optician and you already know you want black plastic wayfarer frames with rivets at the temple, then you're glad that they've got enough of a selection to stock the Classic Nerd line. If you have no idea what you want on your face then you'd be happier with a store that offered you a choice of two or three frames. In fact if you study what a successful clerk in an optical megastore does, she (usually) steers you toward only two or three frames out of the scores of styles they offer.
Contrast selecting from 30+ jams with selecting from 30+ health plans, where the best choice depends on the unknowable (how unlucky will I be this year?), the difficult to know (what is my likelihood of using each of these particular healthcare services?) and the need-an-expert-to-know-for-you (what do all these provisos in the small print mean?).
Years ago I worked as lead developer for a small company developing a vertical market app in an industry that had never been automated before (then a very common scenario). The boss had a simple and seemingly fool-proof marketing scheme, based on commonsense psychology: to maximize sales volume he'd keep prices surprisingly low and to entice buyers he'd give them lots of options for how to configure the system exactly for their needs. Since this was a small company I often went to industry meetings to help out at the vendor booth, and I quickly realized that that commonsense psychology was at variance with actual psychology. People who were used to spending tens of thousands of dollars of equipment would find out that they could, in theory, get started with our software for as little as $200 and lose interest. People who didn't lose interest were quickly overwhelmed with the complexity of figuring out which items they needed to buy from the al la carte menu.
So I proposed this change: combine all those choices into a single entry-level package that would cost a typical customer $10K - $20K, including all the options they'd be likely to use and all the services they'd need to get up and running. It took a year of financial struggle for the boss to decide he was willing to take a cut in sales volume for a boost in profit margins. But when we made the change sales volumes actually went up. People who used to walk by our $200 offering would ask why it was suddenly more expensive, and then I'd show them what they got for $10K but the decision would be simple: is this a good deal or not? And since it was a good deal a lot of them bought, and became good long-term customers for training, consulting services and data.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Fuck off soulskill you goddamn fuckwit.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
20+ years ago, if you were rewiring your lights (UK), you'd buy one of these:
http://www.diyhowto.co.uk/images/projects/lightjb1.jpg
Available in white and black (or dark brown) and 4 or 6 terminal versions.
Now, you have those, all manner of cute enclosures, Wago terminals, DIN terminals, Wago DIN terminals.
Waterproof ones, ones with cable clamps, ones that will fit through a downlighter hole...
Some of the products are very nice - and if you are like me, you are always seeking to "make the best choice" - the most robust product, easiest to work with etc.
It's a good thing - but instead of just getting on with it, people like me spend some time reviewing the options, unwilling to choose the least optimal for an installation that might last 40 years.
That's a very specialist area. Now multiply that into every area of your life.
I had a plumber in the other week to fit a couple of bigger radiators. As one has to hang partly on plasterboard (sheetrock), I gave hime some of my favourite fixings:
http://gripitfixings.co.uk/
He's never seen them before - but was hugely impressed. Doing some carpentry? Used to be: "Screws - number 6-14, brass or steel, countersunk, raised head or roundhead.
By god, look at a screw catalogue now - there's a screw for every occasion.
So yes, it can get stressful, if you care and are an "optimiser" like me. OTOH, I don't care what bread I buy - if it's crap, I 'll buy a different loaf next week!
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
> Relentless growth relies on a large subset of the buying public being able to make poor decisions on what to buy,
> then having to replace that item shortly thereafter. This choice reduction seems like some commie nonsense to me.
This being slashdot, you are presumably thinking of programming languages? Would be a lot better if we only had COBOL 'n FORTRAN, and maybe a little of that PL/1 stuff. Visual Basic was the beginning of the end of rationality; just too much choice about what to do with it. Or am I thinking of PERL? One or the other, anyway.
Jam choices are partly just the existence oif different brands, and partly things that actually matter to consumers: seeded or seedless, what fruit the jam uses, etc.
Having 150 pension plan choices, new car options, etc. is done so that the seller can squeeze as much money as they possibly can out of the customers by presenting choices such that consumers will pick the one that brings the most profit. There is no motive for manufacturers to hide the fact that one jam is made with peaches and another made with strawberries. There *is* a motive to make it as difficult as possible for the consumer to determine which pension plan or car actually meets his needs in order to induce him to get one which is low value for him (and thus high value for the provider or dealership).
These are fundamentally different sorts of "too much choice". People are stressed out by jam choices because they are idiots. People are stressed out by pension plan choices because it is in everyone else's interests that they are stressed out.
Which is about 90% of the catalogue...
Caveat emptor has been around for thousands of years. I wouldn't bes urprised if primates practiced something like this also.
Whilst the American political experience has followed this pattern, if you go and look at the long established small democracies of Europe, you find a very different pattern; PR has enabled specific interest groups to remain outside the large parties and influence government policy more effectively for their particular interests as a result. The text book example of this is Israel where religious parties have ratcheted up the expenditure on Yeshiva and added more and more religiously inspired restrictions on life by selling their MPs' votes to the party most willing to do what they want. Another example lies in the role of Agrarian parties in achieving farm subsidies, whilst the present anti-migrant parties' growth is frightening the rulers around Europe.
I don't like grape. Problem solved?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Keeping expectations low really does help with happiness, but its not without its side effects.
It's called Hick's Law.
Well, if a few dozen bread brands frighten you, the germans couldn't get anything done because they can't decide which one of the 1500 different bread they should eat for breakfast while the french don't know which one of their 3000+ cheeses they should put on the bread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"do we really need 30 types of jam on a store shelf?" No, we just need Raspberry Jam. The remainder can be discarded.
Do you really want to go back to just "coffee" when you can order a "Venti, sugar-free, non-fat, vanilla soy, quadrupio shot, decaf, no foam, extra hot, Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with extra light whip and double shot raspberry syrup"?
Just another day in Paradise
The summary mentions choice of pensions. What the fark is a pension? Never heard of this before.
One of my favorite stores has been doing this since before I was born. TJ's doesn't have many choices, but they tend to have stuff I like. They only have a single choice for many many items. It is generally a good price, good quality, and not a major brand.
I really like it because I am not supporting all the stupid advertising, it saves me money, and I get to eat good stuff without wasting brain power on picking out which goddamn brand of peanut butter is least idiotic.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Agreed. Jam is nothing to get stressed about. The problem is the confuseopoly choices. Do you want the health insurance that has X deductable and Y copay except on alternate Tuesdays when a moose bellows between 2 and 3 A.M. in Montreal (according to the insurance company) or do you want 2X deductable bur Y/2 copay except when a gator growls next to the company's offices in Florida. OH, btw, here's the list of 26.2 million exceptions for plan 1, and this is the 26 million exceptions in plan 2. Now if you will turn to page 10,672, 3rd paragraph, you can find the address to write to if you want the 5 volume set of what things don't count full price towards your deductable for plans 1 - 987, but for ......
THAT causes stress.
You have lead a remarkably sheltered life if you think the average family can afford to try a bunch of different brands each day of the week.
Would it be too much to ask that retailers, those lovable middlemen, help solve this problem? Compared to individual consumers, retailers have vast analytical resources at their disposal. They are in a much better position than consumers to discriminate the good and best from the absolute worst and simply refuse to sell the latter to consumers at all, thus reducing the collective analytical headache. They don't do this. Instead they often consider only their potential profit margin and sell what nets them the greatest margin, regardless of the relative quality of the product. That also produces headaches for consumers as we try to divine the best values for our dollars and avoid the usurious markups. The blame can't all be laid at the feet of manufacturers.
Some dickhead goes to school, memorizes curriculum, gets some "hypothetical title" of psychologist, and tries to sell (advocate) a story about choice is bad.
Choice is a byproduct of free society. If 30 jams weren't feasible, it is a self-correcting condition. They are on the shelves for monetary gain not as charitable donations. If they don't sell, they aren't re-stocked there long.
Comparing that to pension funds? With this retarded shit ""The secret to happiness is low expectations."
Barry Schwartz does not lift. Learn this Barry: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want".
Pension plans make paperwork careers for people who don't actually produce shit. Using the hypothetical example of "150 pension plans, who needs it?", good old Barry-bar fails to mention why there are 150 plans. Of the 150, there are 150 bundled ways to siphon from the beneficiary. Instead of saying you don't need so many, you should say this one leeches off of you the least and these leech more but with gimmicks. You don't need less choice, you need less dishonest people.
http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/fact-sheet/what-happens-when-pension-transferred-insurance-company
Imagine the same argument for computer Operating Systems. say... You don't need 1,000 Operating Systems. Just Microsoft. You're fucked. You chose to get rid of choice. Now it's 100% spyware/malware/adware with "updates" in which they don't tell you what the fuck code they add or remove. To what extent is it spyware, adware, and malware? All keystrokes go to mother-ship. Your voice too. Passwords and encryption keys too. They won't tell you what's in your "updates" either. Advertisements in the start menu. Lying fucks first sold to you, then sold you. Globally.
Linux? You have choices for everything. Every distro, and every app, you have a choice. How much choice? All choice. Every choice. You can grab the source code and compile it to only run software for that specific machine if you want to. But, you don't have to. On behalf of end-users, default versions of software in Linux are chosen. You don't even have to use the defaults. But you can. Being that it is open source, people worldwide can and do look at the actual code... even if you don't. This is why cyberspace is generally all Linux already. Name it, it's probably Linux or a variant like Android.
There are many ways to get from Oregon to Florida. Oh my, we need a psychologist to spew some emotional platitudes about it first... then we realize... damn, it's nice to be able to choose which way to go. But wouldn't everybody just stay in Oregon? Not unless they wanted to. Some may take a ship and go the long way.
Choice is good. From jams on the shelf to pension plans... (disingenuous comparison)... it is still good.
Don't let anybody ever fucking tell you it isn't.. like this "story" did. If somebody is telling you choice is bad, kick them in the nuts.
Everyone in my neighborhood gets a pamphlet in the mail from Trader Joe's that looks like it was made by the guy from Wondermark. Conveniently it's made out of a sort of paper that makes good fire starters, and mercifully only comes once per month, but they are definitely advertising.
that the most effective treatment for the advocacy of less choice is ballistic trauma.
FTFY
that college poisoning is a hazard to life, liberty and property.
Too much choice stresses out the one-size-fits all simpletons.
There is some value with having people who are more informed than you make SOME of the decisions. You trust that their expertise will help you. It's why 401K plans work at businesses. They've already picked 12 good mutual funds; you don't need to wade through a hundred of them.
If I had to choose between a hundred different options, in every aspect of my life, I might get overwhelmed too.
I've felt the same about Bjs wholesale club too. Besides the bulk discounts, way fewer choices than a typical grocery store and I know I'm likely getting it at a good price. I do most my shopping there (well except their fresh veggies sometimes are not great). There is a market for places like this who can do some of the reviewing/selection for you and reduce the number of choices. ...coming from someone too often plagued with analysis paralysis!
I always pick item[0]
thank for information...i like
I still have articles posted from the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, about how many returned technical products worked fine, but customers hadn't been able to get them to work as expected and were convinced that they were faulty. So . . . . . not news.