But when the time actually comes to having to make sense of all this variety, our brains suffer option paralysis and cannot deal with it. We're entranced by a myriad of bright, new, shiny things. We humans, in other words, are a bit like magpies. The table with only six varieties on it sold a whopping ten times more jam than the one with 24. Far more significant, though, was the difference it made to the amount actually purchased. Predictably enough, the table that attracted the most customers was the one with the most varieties of jam on it. A week later, they were given the same deal, only this time they had 24 jam varieties from which to choose. experiment, customers at a gourmet food store were invited to taste six different jams on a display table and given a discount coupon to buy any variety they liked. As scientific studies have shown, humankind cannot bear too much variety. Remember when telephones were a state monopoly and it used to take three months to get a new one installed? - but it is also a wholly natural one. This may seem an ungrateful response to all the miracles the Thatcher revolution achieved. But we're not, are we? Instead, we're mostly wishing we could turn back the clock and return to those innocent, choicefree days when Saturday night meant Morecambe And Wise, and when Heinz's 57 Varieties sounded like an awful, awful lot. If freedom of choice really were the route to contentment, we ought by now to be experiencing hitherto undreamt-of heights of ecstasy. Think of the crazy variety of courses now on offer at university, from windsurfing to the semiotics of EastEnders. Think of the blink-and-you've-missed-them, cheap, instant fashion trends we can buy into at Topshop, Gap, Primark, Zara or Tesco. Or the mindboggling number of new airports to which we can now fly cheaply, from Stansted, Bristol, Manchester or Prestwick. #Tyranny of choice tvAnd that's before you get to the aisle with 154 flavours of jam, or the one with 107 varieties of pasta.Ĭonsider, too, the spectacular variety of TV programmes we can flick through now that most of us have cable. Some of it is flavoured with strawberry, banana or Belgian chocolate some has active bacterial flora some has extra omega-3 and some, quite possibly, is a bit like the white, plain, unmuckedabout-with, milk-flavoured stuff we all used to drink happily in the days before we turned into paranoid health freaks. Choice means competition, and competition makes us all richer.Įven so, recently, I've begun to ask myself whether we're enjoying too much of a good thing.Ĭonsider, for example, that in Tesco it is now possible to buy no fewer than 38 types of milk. If it's all for our benefit, how come it often ends up making us frustrated?Īs an unashamedly Thatcherite free-marketeer, I never thought I'd hear myself railing against the tyranny of choice. Whichever the aisle, we've all been there: a routine trip to the supermarket has ended up taking three times longer than it should because of the stupidly large range of varieties we have to wade through.
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