A few weeks ago, I mentioned in passing that I think of WRC primarily in terms of value addition not logistics, and that I’d have more to say about that at some point. Returning to the topic, this post is about choice. My focus here is consumer choice, but certainly the topic has implications well beyond our lives as consumers.
One academic who studies choice took the time to do an inventory of his “normal” neighborhood supermarket. He counted 85 varieties of crackers, 285 varieties of cookies, 13 sports drinks, 65 box drinks for kids, 85 other flavors and brands of juices, 75 iced teas and adult drinks, and so on. This type of mind-boggling choice should ring familiar to any resident of a modern Western nation.
To a point, a world of radically increased choice is a nice problem to have since it is a problem of affluence as opposed to poverty. I personally have no interest in returning to a world where, as is famously attributed to Henry Ford, you could have your Model T “in any color, as long as it was black.”
But here’s the thing: past a point, having more options does not appear to make us any happier. And isn’t that the real value of choice?
In a study that nicely illustrates the problem, one group of participants was offered a selection of six chocolates and a second group faced an array of 30 chocolates. Each participant was asked to choose a chocolate for themselves based on appearance and description, and was then allowed to taste and rate that chocolate. Finally, the participants were given the choice of a box of chocolates or cash as payment for their participation in the study.
The finding was that, compared with the group given more choice, the group with less choice gave their chosen chocolate higher ratings and were four times more likely to take the chocolate instead of the cash as payment. In short, they were markedly more satisfied chocolate consumers than their counterparts who had five times the choice.
There are a few plausible explanations for this. Part of it would seem to derive from the annoyance or even exhaustion that is often felt at the very outset of the decision-making process when the number of options is very high and the differences between them very fine. Another is the “suffers-by-comparison” factor: when there are many options, we are more likely to feel our choice was somehow a failure in the end. If there are 30 chocolates on the tasting tray, for instance, you are more likely to suppose that The Perfect Chocolate was probably one of the 29 you didn’t choose.
So that’s a brief statement of the problem, and it’s one I suspect may particularly resonate at this time of the year. In the next post on this topic I’ll try to outline how WRC is an attempt to offer a small response to this condition, at least as it applies to trail running gear. In the meantime, the video below is a TED Talk by Barry Schwartz, the academic I referred to earlier. It may be of interest if you’d like to think a bit further about the “paradox of choice.”
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