Why too much choice is stressing us out
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
http://www.hyperlabs.net/ergonomia/presentazioni/euroia11/ the slides of my presentation at Euro IA 2011: Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making
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."
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.
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"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."
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
So you want to buy an Asus wifi router?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmcat29320005...
Enjoy your paralysis.
"Sort By -> Customer Rating" is a very helpful filter I usually start with.
And then you get this view:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=a...
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.
Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/is-the-famous-parad...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9cebd444-cd9c-11de-8162-00144feabd...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/more-is-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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]
[0] http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...
And yet they were found to be price rigging in the UK.
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
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.
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.
If it is an "illusion", it's still built on a solid base of real choice that centralized government management completely failed to produce.
> 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?
> 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.
> [...]
> In the end he became a finicky vegetarian."
Exactly same argument can be used against Western-style cornucopia-of-false-choices stores, or anything else at all for that matter.
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.
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.
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.
Illegal hairstyles? There has to be a bizarre story behind this.
Even in the US this is an issue: http://madamenoire.com/501738/texas-federal-judge-rules-hair...
Me? I just buy the prettiest box, not necessarily the shiniest.
I selected the Crest 3D White after the same torturous 5 minutes :)
But I'm not sure all that choice made my life any worse for the ware, and I'm naturally suspicious of any heavy-handed solutions to keep them from us.
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.
More or less. I'd say it's a "solution" that the market found for the race-to-the-bottom problem.
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.
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.
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.”
Full transcript: http://cultivatingthought.com/author/aziz-ansari/ (scroll down to the white background)
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.
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.
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.
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 take the same approach with many boring shopping choices.
http://www.colgatetotal.com/health-benefits/toothpaste-ingre...
The only difference appears to be 0.14% vs 0.15% w/v fluoride ion.
The naturopathic folks will tell you that triclosan is toxic and you should avoid the mainstream brands altogether.
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.
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.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/05/11/why-do-people-support-r...
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.
Privatising public infrastructure is absurd, especially when you exactly build an adjacent railway line to compete.
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.).
If it would be a real privatization, chances that it would be better.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/28/network-rail...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I guess I'm having a bad day and the author's malcolmgladwellization of the paradox of choice was too much...
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."
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".
Having no choice and getting whatever sub-par product they make available is usually the behavior we see from monopolies one entrenched.
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.)
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.
This is very often a false choice - if you're in one store, you are likely choosing between a Unilever product and a Unilever product, for example.
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.
So you only need to make one stop to get everything you need
Also Trader Joe's is actually owned by Aldi, in case you didn't know.
I recently noticed that https://www.helloenvoy.com/ is doing TJ delivery in my area.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/quest-improve-americ...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/MONEY-Master-Game-Financial-Freedom/dp...
[3] https://investorjunkie.com/38192/money-master-game-review/
[4] http://www.basonasset.com/yes-i-actually-read-most-of-tony-r...
[5] http://radicalpersonalfinance.com/a-comprehensive-review-and...
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.
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.
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.
Choice is good as long as people don't feel like they need to optimize, but instead feel they can settle for good enough.
A nicer Soviet-era grocery store:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE
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.
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.
I love to be made a drink. And love a surprise, partly because it saves me having to make a decision.
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.
Too much choice and the user gets paralyzed and doesn't buy anything.
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.
https://google.com/search?q=decision-fatigue
fascinating little thing I recently learned about
if you find yourself wearing the same clothes often, it's a sign
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?
Curator of gym sessions: private fitness trainer you hired
Curator of films: Netflix's own "suggestions for you" section, Rotten Tomatoes, movie critics
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
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.
There are quite a few practical tips in there to help decrease the sense of overwhelm from having too many choices.
https://medium.com/@ade3/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d
Which effectively makes the same point: it's easier to sell something with fewer choices.
http://elitedaily.com/money/science-simplicity-successful-pe...
‘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.
Freedom from choice is what we want
Indeed!
Sales of chips went up about 25% immediately.
I assume he meant the five that were the best-sellers at his own store.