The tyranny of choice

aka Whatever happened to simplicity?

Image by DigestContent from Pixabay

A few days ago I ventured out in search of an item of clothing. (The precise nature of this apparel need not detain us.) I hate shopping, and I hate clothes shopping in particular. Either the things I look at are designed to accentuate all the excess baggage I’m trying to rid myself of, or the size on the label bears no relation to the actual size. Thus for me, my ideal shop is one of the following, in decreasing order of preference:

1. Elaine buys it for me. All I have to do is say “Yes”, “Please” and “Thank you”, all of which I can manage.

2. Buy it online.

3. Go to a shop.

If I have to do one of the last two mentioned, my preference is for it to be quick. By “quick” I mean less than about five minutes in any one shop, and no more than an hour shopping, including travelling time, browsing in a bookshop and having a leisurely coffee.

Unfortunately, “shopping” and “quick” are two words which rarely appear in the same sentence, as I rediscovered when I sallied forth on my latest excursion.

All I wanted was one item. In days gone by, all you needed to know was your size. But that’s not good enough these days. Here are just some of the things you have to decide on:

• colour

• one colour or two

• style

• material

I listed all the attributes in a spreadsheet — not all of them: I decided to stop at 17 — and used a function called FACT(). This gives you the number of combinations of items (it stands for factorial). For example, if you need to organise a group of 3 people, there are 3 x 2 x 1 ways of doing so (work it out “manually” if you don’t believe me), or FACT(3) in spreadsheet language.

Well, applying this approach to the shopping for this particular item, I worked out that, assuming I spent one second on each possible combination, and did that for 24 hours a day, it would take me over 3 million years to decide.

I don’t have that sort of time.

And that’s just one item. If you apply the same logic to all the other bits and pieces, you end up spending more time putting together a wardrobe than the amount of time the universe has existed.

It’s the same with coffee bars these days. I remember when you had a few basic choices:

• tea

• coffee without milk

• coffee with milk

Now you get signs saying “Choose from over 37 wonderful options”.

So the above list now looks something like this:

• Tea

• decaf tea

• green tea

• lemon tea

• coffee

• decaf coffee

• coffee with skimmed milk

• coffee with semi-skimmed milk

• coffee with full cream milk

• coffee with lactose-free milk

This means it would take you six years to decide what you wanted to drink. I once became so confused by all the options (oat milk, soya milk, lactose-free milk etc etc) on the board of the cafe I had wandered into that I asked the girl at the counter:

Me: Don’t you have any normal milk?

Girl: No.

Me: Why not?

Girl: Because this is a vegan cafe.

Ooops.

Around London there are still cafes where you get to decide only if you want tea or coffee, and whether you want a cup or a mug. There’s a lot to be said for that. Now, if only someone would open a clothes shop based on similar principles….