People are subject to trifling likes and dislikes every day. There seems to be no end to the division and subdivision of taste. In India, in those days, if I wanted ice cream after a meal, I simply ordered ice cream. At most there might have been two or three flavors; often there was only one. Today I have one hundred and forty-seven varieties to choose from, and it’s not enough to want chocolate; I have to decide between possibilities like Dutch, Bittersweet, Super Fudge Wonder, and Chewy White Chocolate Macadamia. (Often I just tell the clerk, “Give me the one you like best.”) And for coffee I have to specify French Roast, Colombian, Kona, or one of a dozen other varieties. I know people whose whole day is affected when they can’t get the coffee they like, made just the way they like it. As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit—in everything, because this is a habit of the mind.
Ricky Irvine
on 25 Feb 09Thanks for this. I often wonder about how our Internet and American cultures encourage us to have very immediate and definite opinions about everything. No conclusion yet, except that I’d rather be quiet and listen to the wisdom of others.
Happy
on 25 Feb 09My favorite dessert out: vanilla ice cream and the basic house coffee – black. Simple, delicious, and I can order it in most any restaurant without even looking at the dessert menu.
My wife makes fun of me though for not being adventurous enough. She jokes: “You can get vanilla ice cream and coffee at home.” I know. I like it at home. I like it at a restaurant. The number of choices at the restaurant does nothing to make me like it less.
The routine goes like this when ordering dessert: I look at her with a slight smile. She looks back, wondering… “will he dare order the same thing.. again?” She already knows the answer and just shakes her head when I say, “Vanilla ice cream and coffee, black.” She snickers, amazed that I can be so ignorant of all the wonderful choices out there. I laugh. We enjoy our great desserts.
Michal
on 25 Feb 09I couldn’t agree more. I’m originally from Poland. I remember the times where you could choose from 3 flavors of ice cream, order one kind of coffee – black. We all drove the same car (Fiat 126p :)). People didn’t know any better and I think they were happier. After moving to US it was shocking and confusing at first (and sometimes still is) to have huge list of stuff to choose from. It’s interesting to see people pondering (sometimes for minutes) in order to make the final choice. I wonder how much time on average people waste trying to decide what they want..
James C
on 25 Feb 09I think that’s a bit muddled.
It makes the reasonable point that you don’t always want to be presented with a bazillion choices, especially where there’s only small differences between them.
But it comes across a complaint about choice, as if it was all bad. Lots of choices is, itself, not a problem. It’s when you’re forced to deal with them at once.
Would you prefer to live in a city where there’s only three different meals you can ever have for dinner, or would you prefer to live in a city where there’s a large variety of different ethnic cuisines available?
The quote also suggests that having fine-grained preferences - wanting White Chocolate Macadamia - means inflexibility: only being satisfied by that. “As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit”.
But that’s not necessarily so. At particular times, at particular places, in particular moods, I might feel like that flavor, and at other times and places, I might want something else. We get bored and want to try new things.
And if you’ve only got a few options available, isn’t it easy to develop prejudices? We probably all know people who grew up eating one type of food and won’t dare touch food of an unfamiliar cuisine.
If you’re beyond a certain age, you’ve probably gone from growing up in a world with fewer choices to a world with many more choices. Perhaps this means we didn’t develop very good skills for handling choice. Perhaps the kids of today will manage much better? I don’t know, but this possibility seems to get overlooked.
Christophe Franco
on 25 Feb 09About choices, I’ve watched a very interesting documentary a few weeks ago, about a man who had just been released from jail after spending about 10 years behind bars.
He explained that the major problem about jail, for him, had been the lack of choice, expecially regarding food. Since it was in France, he had been – like most people in French prisons – cooking his own meals in his cell, using inprovised kitchenware. In such conditions, you can’t really make meals, even if you have the choice in the ingredients, you are limited to what you can cook in very basic ways.
So after he was released, he has taken the habit to eat regularly at self-service restaurants (the cheapest kind of restaurant you can find in France, usually quite crappy food). Not that he couldn’t cook his own meals at home now he was free, but even by cooking his own meals he would have had to cook only one kind of food for each meal. What he was looking for at self-service restaurants, was the ability to be presented with a large variety of meals, and to choose.
I think it’s very revealing of the very nature of the human being concerning the ability to choose : we NEED to have choices to do, even difficult ones. Sometimes, it’s the only intellectual work that people do in their whole day.
Marcus McConnell
on 25 Feb 09Reminds me of wine culture. There are so many choices that people are too intimidated to order wine. There are wine stores that create systems to simplify wine choices. Having many options is okay as long as you have a good system for finding them. UI studies have shown that 7 to 9 choices at once is about the optimal limit for humans. Classify ice cream flavors into the “Chocolate Group”, “Nut Group”, “Candy Group” and then refine.
Stephen James
on 25 Feb 09As a child who would take over 10 minutes to order an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins, I know say it’s just consumption. Who cares? There will always be more choices until you mail order your custom casket from the Internet.
Keith
on 25 Feb 09Reminds me a TED talk I watched in which the guy told an anecdote about going to buy bluejeans at the Gap and finally just said:
I want to buy the type of jeans that is the same as when there was only 1 type of bluejean available.
Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, was interviewed on NPR at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and said something like:
In the 1950s & 60s people wanted choice. We gave them abundant choices. Now people are telling us we shouldn’t be giving so many choices.
Graham
on 25 Feb 09Not to make this all about culture, but I had an interesting experience when I work in a print shop, where an emigrant Chinese family bought out a local Chinese restaurant and came in to my shop to get the menu reprinted with their new name/number at the top.
First thing I noticed was that the menu was identical to the previous owner. IDENTICAL. Prices and everything.
After taking down the guy’s new phone number, I asked him what the name of the place would be. He responded by asking me what I though he should call the restaurant. I was the copy shop clerk. Being asked to name this dude’s business…..what???
It became clear to me that he really had no understanding of how branding in America worked. He saw the name of the restaurant, and their specific set of dishes, as completely trivial and unimportant. He even asked me to print the name of a separate, unrelated Chinese restaurant on his menus “because people already know that Chinese place.” I had to explain that this could be legally bad for him….
In the end though, I was envious of his view. After all, how does the name of place affect the quality of its food? But as Americans, we have been “tricked” by marketers into caring about advertising and brands a great deal.
David Andersen
on 25 Feb 09Re: Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM.
Well Rick, I can safely tell you we don’t want a bunch of crappy choices.
Chance Bliss
on 25 Feb 09I guess it comes down to a balance of how much time you want to spend choosing versus the relative happiness of your selection. Individual personalities, culture and environment each have an impact. The key measure of a product or service is how well they strike that balance for their target users.
David Andersen
on 25 Feb 09“After all, how does the name of place affect the quality of its food?”
That’s not the point. The name is a proxy and signpost for many other things.
Anonymous Coward
on 25 Feb 09“The name is a proxy and signpost for many other things.”
In our culture yes. But is this really necessary? How in the world could the name of the place affect the tastiness of their General Zho Chicken?
We’ve been taught to look to brand identity to establish a baseline expectation for quality and service. Brand Identity can convey information about price/quality/consistency/etc. If I see a firm with the word “Luxury” in their title, then I can guess reasonably well that their junk is high price / high quality.
Even the name here (37signals) sends information (modern, not stuffy, web, etc).
However, all this marketing can be an utter lie. McDonald’s coffee recently out-scored Starbucks for quality, if I’m not mistaken, despite the marketing (from both firms) that McD’s was a lower price / lower quality offering.
I’m not saying that the name wouldn’t matter to me. In fact, I tried to get the guy to name his place something catchy and different. But his cultural perception was that the name should be anything BUT different, and wasn’t really important at all after that.
Take your favorite brand and substitute “Melon” for their name. Would you enjoy their offerings any less? (“Man, this new Melon mPhone is awesome!”)
Laurel Fan
on 25 Feb 09It seems that what this post is somewhat in opposition to the Getting Real philosophy as I understand it.
I’ve never had the choice of 147 ice creams at a restaurant. Sure, the three choices might be weird stuff like garam masala, salted caramel and black olive, but if you’re going to a restaurant that specializes in uniqueness and slightly pushing your food boundaries, you might not get vanilla (it actually sounds like narrow tastes to only want the familiar).
Just because I like the lox flavored ice cream at Max and Mina’s in Flushing doesn’t mean I’m going to demand lox from the farmer’s market vendor at home.
If we take wide (vs narrow) tastes as a desired quality as seems to be promoted in this post, what we want is uniqueness and specialization on the part of service/product providers (which produces more, possibly overwhelming choice for the customer).
From a perspective of an individual business, specialization actually means providing fewer choices (find what you’re good at, distinguish yourself from the competition, etc…). From a perspective of an individual customer, specialization means dealing with more choices (since businesses are going to specialize instead of being generic vanilla).
Rich
on 25 Feb 09Sometimes, I could just go for something simpler made well rather than some half assed attempt at sophistication.
Software, food, music, websites, applies everywhere.
Hari Rajagopal
on 25 Feb 09Here is my 2 cents.
I started thinking about choices when Barry Schwarz released his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less ” that argues in favor of less choices and more choices as not so desirable.
Well, the way I see it, when people are confronted with choices, essentially, it forces you to ask yourself what do you really stand for?
And that is uncomfortable for a lot of people. Because they don’t really know themselves, don’t know who they are, don’t know what their value system is etc.
They have been making the popular choices, influenced by their role models and what not.
When I go to buy a toothpaste at a super market, I see one made by a multinational conglomerate (least pricey), one by a local company (less pricey) and one touting to be a “green” company (priciest).
You can clearly see what buying each one tells about you. It tells what you care about, what you value, what your priorities are.
If you know what you stand for, the choice will be clear.
The proliferation of choices, in my opinion, is forcing us to bring out our individuality, whether it is in choosing ice cream flavors or cell phones.
When the commenter above (@Happy) picks vanilla ice cream all the time, in spite of the gazillion choices available at his fingertips, he has made it extremely clear to himself what he is all about.
Picking vanilla when no other choices are available is one thing, but picking it when 147 flavors are available is a totally another thing, you got to be pretty darn clear about who you are.
And only the availability of choices can do that to you.Don Schenck
on 25 Feb 09If too many choices bother or perplex you, do what I do: Ignore them and create your own options.
For example, at a restaurant, I often will get a feel of what’s on the menu, but not order off of it. I’ll tell the server something like “I want something with chicken, something with sauce, spicy…” and they’ll know what I want.
Seriously. It works great. I’m very often surprised at what I get to eat, I’ve never (never!) been disappointed, and I think the server likes the idea. Gives them some input into the experience. I tip very well, too, for what that’s worth.
You can very often get away with ignoring “offerings” and, instead, asking for what you REALLY want. Try it.
mangst
on 25 Feb 09This reminds me of a paper I read:
http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it goes something like this: an experiment was carried out in a grocery store where two different displays of jam were shown on two different days. The goal was to see which display sold the most jam. The first display had five flavors of jam. The second had thirty.
So which sold the most? You’d think that the second would…with more choices, people should be more likely to find a flavor they like, right? But wrong! Actually, the display with only five choices sold more jam. It was concluded that when presented with excessive choice, people would rather not choose at all than run the risk of making a bad choice (buying jam they didn’t like), which is more likely to happen the more choices you have.
GeeIWonder
on 25 Feb 09Indeed. The ‘tyranny of choice’ as it is often called leads to paralysis more often than not.
Benjy
on 25 Feb 09Where is this magical place with 147 ice cream flavors?
It’s the classic long tail / short tail discussion… there are certainly those who only want to chose among the hits—chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, etc. And there are those who love ice cream and would relish the opportunity to compare more obscure or specific options like a dozen varieties of chocolate or some rare fruit flavor. Depends on who and how the place is trying to serve.
Andrew Banks
on 25 Feb 09Have you seen:
The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200
David Andersen
on 26 Feb 09Oversimplification Alert!
Oversimplification Alert!
Peter
on 26 Feb 09It’s an american thing. In Europe, you order a coffee, you don’t get questions, you get a coffee.
Dave Lens
on 26 Feb 09Denis Leary made a point of this in his ‘97 show ‘Lock & Load’, about coffee and beer in particular.
Here’s 7 minutes worth of footage: http://is.gd/k5y3
Graham
on 27 Feb 09Bah, you insult the wild wonderful world of beer when you insist that there should only be a few choices. My favorite is lambic, which smells quite literally like vomit in a sweaty gym sock (not exaggerating) , but tastes wonderful. Hurray beer!
A multitude of choices are fine if I’m in a super-specialized beer bar. However, if I’m out at a regular restaurant, having 1 light, 1 amber and 1 dark beer is choice enough. Some of the best restaurants I’ve ever been too have 5-6 dishes on the menu, plus a special or two. Its oddly liberating.
This discussion is closed.