In 1977 my favorite grocery store in the Detroit suburb where I lived was remodeled. It morphed from a regular, human-sized environment into an airplane hangar. It was big enough for weather patterns to form inside.
The first time I went in I skirted the outside edge. I felt safe among the mountains of vegetables and fruits, meats and poultry, eggs and dairy because I could visually ID them. But my downfall came as I detoured into the interior to get a box of cereal. I went tharn. That’s what happened to the bunnies in Watership Down when they were overwhelmed. It’s the lapine equivalent to a deer being caught in the headlights.
I mean, really . . . have you looked at the number of different kinds of cereal there are? I can’t speak for the 21st century, of course, because I rarely venture into the interior aisles of a grocery store and never to the cereal aisle, but there were too many then and I’m guessing that there are more now.
I never went back to that store. I found a bakery, green grocer, wine store and a butcher, and they filled all my needs. It sounds like it would take a lot longer to shop at four stores instead of one but it didn’t. In fact it was faster because I didn’t have to ponder the choices . . . the thousands of choices.
I turns out, I’m not the only one who thinks that too much choice is too much despite our cultural belief to the contrary. There’s a guy who wrote a book about it. He gives a compelling TED presentation here: Barry Schwartz talks about The Paradox of Choice.