Are You Pro-Choice?

If there are 20 different kinds of cough syrup on the shelf, and I've never bought cough syrup before, I might just give up on the whole thing and keep on coughing.

Really? I just grab one that is moderately expensive among the whole and go for it. When you really have no basis for comparison you just have to hope that FDA didn't fall asleep at the switch and take the plunge.

walking into a record emporium such as amoeba in san francisco or waterloo in austin is sort of overwhelming since it is hard to make up my mind which purchases are the most urgent in that moment. that's where i think "too much choice" has the most deleterious effect: luxury goods where there are so many similarly great choices one can make. things like groceries or medicine are easier - at least to me - because being hungry or sick leads me to more efficient decision-making based on a actual physiological need.

etc.

Primary inhibitors:

1.when the risks of choosing wrong reach a certain level. High price, personal cost.
2. when there are no clear criteria for choosing, or if the offered criteria are not relevant to me.

Computers are an interesting case because, while there are very specific choice critiera,many people don't understand them or their practical significance. Choosing between phone plans is frustrating to me because the differentiators don't fit my personal situation well.

Re cold medicine--I'm also prone to going without rather than choosing wrong. Too many experiences where I felt worse (woozy, generally drugged up) so the personal cost of choosing wrong is too high (ok, i'm also sick and not thinking straight...).

I have trouble shopping for toilet paper. Very hard for me to figure out which is the best value. The cheapest is scratchy. The most expensive is overkill. The coupons complicate the math, too. Then there's that whole 1-ply vs. 2-ply thing.
Also have trouble with paper towels.

If you showed me a huge variety of wines, I might throw up my hands in despair rather than trying to puzzle out which one to buy. Show me an equally huge variety of candy bars and I'd pretty quickly narrow it down to half a dozen that I liked and then choose one. That's because I consume a lot more candy bars than I do wine.

Quit your bellyachin'. Start winin'.

Simple choices -- where you can make the decision quickly and do not have to study and absorb complex information -- are easy. You might become exasperated by being confronted with ten kinds of strawberry jam, but unless your a congenital ditherer, you shouldn't have any trouble choosing which jam to buy.

Choices involving complex products are another matter. Who, for example, would have the time to read and compare the fine print in 40 different competing health insurance policies (a fate to which Obamacare will condemn us)? Sure, in one sense, that's a wealth of choice -- but in every practical sense, it's chaos.

These social science researchers need to figure out how to distinguish a lot of choices from a glut of choices.

Mostly I get annoyed by choice when one of the following happens:

1) Not enough information. Like five lightbulbs, several of which don't say how much power they use and lumens they produce.

2) Fake choice. Ten cough syrups, all containing the same ingredients in the same order.

3) False choice. Several items, with AB, BC, BD, AD, but no AC when I want it. Or twelve brushes, none of them the right size to clean my drinking glasses.

4) Choice that can't be sorted through. Having 50 choices is tough. Having fifty choices when you can only see 3 at a time is aggravating.

Also, now I know why Kevin is so pudgy, if you eat so many candy bars ^-^

Wine is a good example of too much choice, and cheese too. Thanks to Whole Foods and a few other places in town. Even if I find something I liked, the next time I go to the store I have a hard time remembering or finding that one I liked before. And even if I could find the ones I liked, I would feel like buying the same thing again was a missed opportunity to try something new, and more than likely the new choice would disappoint and discourage me from buying wine or cheese again. Actually, that's mostly my cheese situation. Since I have only ever enjoyed one bottle of wine before, it's more about cheese. When I have to buy wine, I basically stand around choosing for 15 minutes and then just take my best guess.

And I will never find that bottle of wine again. A friend in California had a special wine with no label made by a guy who works in a winery near SF (maybe it was the vintner). Apparently they are allowed to buy a small portion of the grape crop for themselves and make a couple hundred bottles of wine for their own personal use. My friend got a few bottles and opened his last one for a lobster dinner he made, and I figured it would be wasted on me. I couldn't believe my tongue when it actually tasted good (it was red wine, and I couldn't even tell you what kinds of grapes went into it). Of course I've probably never had wine that cost more than $50 a bottle before, so maybe there are lots of good wines out there. But $50 or $100 for a bottle of something I probably won't even like is way too much. Actually, as good as that wine was, I doubt I would pay $100 for it either. I can think of a lot more enjoyable ways to spend $100 than on drinking.

Right now, I'm looking for a new GPS and a new digital camera. Let's discuss both, shall we?

This camera makes spectacular images . . . but it takes over 1 sec to focus. No deal. Missed too many shots with my current camera. This other focuses like a bat out of hell . . . but it uses a proprietary cable. No dice. Got too many things for which I can't find the damn cable. Got too many other things I want to use both at home and at the office. A cable at each place is nice, but not for $40. This third one takes HD movies . . . but the zoom doesn't work while movie making. This other one has a functional zoom . . . but the movies can only be 10 minutes long and are stored in a bizarre format.

GPS is even worse. I have yet to figure out how this year's model can have features from last year's model go missing. Once you've written the program for route avoidance, shouldn't you be putting it in every device from that point on up the price scale and forward in time? How does the $300 one have it and the $400 one not?

Why do vendors complicate their product lines in these ways? This is what makes me indecisive. Everything, quite literally, has a deal breaker built in. Let me offer some simple advice to all manufactures of everything everywhere forever.

1. Every higher level in your line should contain the lower levels as a subset (except possibly for specialized markets like GPS for truckers).

2. NO MORE PROPRIETARY SHIT EVER! No proprietary file formats, no proprietary cables, no proprietary batteries, and Sony for goddamn sake leave off the goddamn memory stick!

3. NO MORE PROPRIETARY SHIT EVER!

4. If you have a set of desirable features at some point in your product line, make at least one feasible attempt to put all of them in one device. I realize this isn't always possible, but it is more often than it is not. If I could identify a camera that takes decent stills up to ISO 400-800, takes HD movies in AVCHD format with operable zoom while filming (for God's sake, if Panasonic can figure it out so can you), doesn't impose a ridiculous artificial time limit on movies, is reasonably compact (I do want a DSLR but I don't want ONLY a DSLR), focuses in good light in less than 0.3 sec without a half press (and don't get me started on that stupid "functionality") and in bad light in less than 1 sec, and uses a standard USB cable for every goddamn thing you need a cable for, I'd buy it yesterday.

Please quit jerking my fucking chain.

Without getting too deep into explaining what I do (it's basically halfway between tech support and sales), I have to suggest that your description of salespeople is completely wrong.

A salesperson isn't trying to ask you questions to restrict choice based purely on restricting choice. Rather, he knows that he's got a much higher close rate if he tries to sell you something that you perceive you need/want than something you don't need/want.

I'm in the technology industry, so the questions I ask are pretty simple -- what do you plan to do with it, and exactly what things (reliability, performance, feature set, etc) do you care most about. It's pretty quick to narrow it down and get at least close to what you want. The "sales" portion that follows is largely about why you should take the product I'm trying to sell you rather than the product all my competitors are trying to sell you. I realize I can make that argument better if I choose a product close to what you perceive as your want/need -- because my competitors will choose whatever they think is closest.

To extrapolate, take wine. When I go looking for red wine, I particularly am a fan of Zinfandel from the Dry Creek Valley or Russian River Valley. A salesperson who asks me what I'm interested in will probably detect, if I say that, that I know a little bit about wine and probably am at least a bit interested in it. He/she will also know, if a good salesperson, roughly what the characteristics of that wine are. At that point he can try to point me in the direction of what I'm asking about ("well, have you tried this winery that just happens to be right in the region?") or maybe if he doesn't have something that fits can try to use that information to sell something similar, i.e. "well, I have this Pinot Noir from the Alexander Valley that I think is very similar to some of those Zins from Dry Creek, and I think you'd like it". If I walk in and tell him I'm used to buying $15-25 dollar bottles of Zin from Dry Creek, he's not going to take me to the aisle full of $100 bottles of Napa Cabernet. Because he knows that I'll view him -- rather than a trusted source for assistance -- as a worthless snake trying to sell the highest-priced item in the store.

Salespeople have the easiest job in the world if you know what you want, can articulate it to them, and if they have it on the shelf. That's primarily why they're asking questions. The questions serve dual purpose if they don't have it, of course, as it gives him the information to come up with the closest approximation to what you want. Sales folks aren't all thiefs and charlatans, they're really just trying to figure out what you want and give it to you. Those who are trying to give you a snow job are usually pretty transparent if you have two brain cells to rub together.