The Pandemic Has Removed Much Of The Problem Of Consumer Overchoice

The basic assumption of  economists is that humans are rational agents and, when offered a set of choices - say for a particular product -  will end up making the optimum one. But in an excellent book: The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less, the author (Barry Schwarz) showed this isn't the case and when humans are offered a surfeit of choice they punt! They either don't make any purchase, or they opt for the first one that comes to mind or in their field of vision.

A worse effect is paralysis of action or decision, as well as depression,  occurring because excessive choice presages a lack of control and autonomy. As noted by Schwartz (p. 104):

'Like the mechanical rabbit at the dog racing track that speeds along just ahead of the dogs no matter how fast they run, aspirations and expectations about control speed ahead of their realization, no matter how liberating the realization becomes."

In effect, more choices may not mean more control,  ccrtainly if they lead to paralysis in making the choice.  Consider just the case of Medicare and Medicare Advantage which choices often lead seniors spinning their wheels in confusion and costly inaction, indecision. 

This arises because each year prospective beneficiaries  must confront a miasma of more than 500 different plan choices for Medicare Advantage and Medicare proper.   In the latter seniors can choose from Parts B, D, and F but often make choices that end up being extremely costly. Worse, the whole Medicare system is contrived of constantly moving parts with changing prices, benefits year to year.  Especially Part D - the Prescription Drug Plan. The situation has become so intractable for many seniors, they are having to hire special services to wade through all the issues and make a decision.

A Wikipedia item references 'overchoice' :

"The phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many equivalent choices are available.Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice"

In a nutshell, the more decisions we make in any given day, and the more novel information we attempt to absorb, the more mental energy we use up. Worse,  the lower the quality of our resultant decision-making.  Or as Schwartz puts it (ibid.):

"To avoid the escalation of such burdens we must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide individually when choice really matters and focus ot energies there."

It appears now the pandemic has reduced a lot of the choices - namely in purchases such as groceries- that bordered on the ridiculous before, e.g. "275 varieties of cereal and 175 types of salad dressing" according to Schwartz' findings (p. 10)

But now, as a WSJ article points out ('Why The American Consumer Has Fewer Choices - Maybe For Good',  June 27, p. A10):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-american-consumer-has-fewer-choicesmaybe-for-good-11593230443

We may have crossed the Rubicon to the world of less choice.  And it will help our brains expend less wasted energy.   Example?

"Some IGA Inc. grocery stores now offer only four choices of toilet paper. A few months ago, before the coronavirus pandemic, IGA’s 1,100 U.S. stores typically carried about 40 varieties."

As IGA Chief Exec John Ross aptly put it:

"We may not need 40 different choices of toilet paper."

Indeed, why would anyone need more than 4?  (1-ply environment friendly, 2-ply, 3-ply, 4-ply) All the excess does is clutter the brain, overwhelm its decision making processes. That includes having to choose from 220 varieties of chicken soup or 275 kinds of cereal.   Why the surfeit of choice and why the trend to downshift now?  According to the piece:

"Consumer -oriented companies spent the past decades trying to please just about everyone.  The pandemic made that impossible and now some no longer plan to try. Sellers of potato chips, cars, meals and more have been narrowing offerings since the coronavius snarled supply chains and coaxed consumers back to familiar brands." 

 Which is welcome as it's a move back toward sanity, toward temperance, and essential conservation.  Ultimately, let's be clear that the spawning of vast numbers of "choices" in products was a deliberate effort to ramp up consumption - which is 70 percent of GDP.    As the WSJ piece points out: 

 "For years companies added choices and their execs told investors by putting a token salad on every fast food menu chain or stocking a detergent for 'extra sensitive skin'  they could cater to the whims of more people in a family."

Thus, instead of ONE detergent for a whole family, these companies conceived of one for each member, ever so slightly tweaked from the base product.  Instead of one purchase, maybe 3, 4 or 5 at once.  And as we learn (ibid.):

"These efforts helped goods makers claim more shelf space as more retail stores and supermarkets expanded into more big box stores. "

In this way, a strategy of offering less choice was deemed "contrarian" and even anti-capitalist.   But a strange thing happened as producers were poised to jack up choices even more:  the pandemic hit and with it panic buying -   which cleared supermarket shelves of staples, especially toilet paper, hand sanitizer and even soap.   Suddenly, choice sobriety and sense emerged as retail execs realized a change in course was in order.  Thus:

"Retailers and food companies over the past several months have convened calls in which it was decided food makers should cut back on options and concentrate production on the most in-demand goods."

And lo and behold the food producers have responded.  For example, Smucker pausing production of JIF low fat peanut butter and Nestle permanently dropping some lean cuisine varieties. Meanwhile, Mondelez has removed 25 varieties of its snacks to simplify the supply chain and reduce inventories.

The question now is whether this sober reduction in choice can last, analogous to whether the lowered CO2 emissions (also a result of the pandemic) would last.  A future post will touch on that.

Future Shock and Decision Fatigue - Are They Really One And The Same? How To Deal With Them

Never mind the incessant, infernal chaos and toxic memetic emissions  emanating from Trump world, we can't allow that detritus to dominate our waking lives.  As functional and conscious humans we all have other things apart from Trump and his denizens to task us mentally, emotionally.   Namely, that from the first minute any of us awakens each morning, our brains are already overwhelmed with too much stimulation.   We're basically saddled (by evolution) with brains still more attuned to identifying predators on the savannah as opposed to adjusting to the cacophony of a modern city with its congested traffic, lack of green space, and noise.

In addition,  each day we face an overwhelming number of choices: Whether to exercise or not, how long if we do, what clothes to wear, what breakfast to eat, which tasks to prioritize and so on.  To make matters worse, we’re constantly bombarded with notifications from our  digital devices—emails, text messages and phone calls—as well as disparate information on the web.

It’s no wonder we’re exhausted at the end of each day. Our brains are constantly multitasking and working 24/7 without a break.  That was not how evolution designed them, and it will take another 100,000 yrs. at least to get to that phase.

This condition of maladaptation  is what author  Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock" referred to  as "over choice ".   Too many choices, especially in media, diluting any collective attention to one thing, one show, one event.  A Wikipedia item references:

"The phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many equivalent choices are available.Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice"

The basic assumption is that humans are rational agents and, when offered a set of choices - say for a product- will end up making the optimum one. But in an excellent book entitled The Paradox of Choice, the author showed this isn't the case and when humans are offered a surfeit of choice they punt! They either don't make any purchase, or they opt for the first one that comes to mind or the item most prominent in their field of vision.

Alvin Toffler himself wrote, in terms of "decisional overstimulation" (pp. 326-27):

"When we combine the effects of decisional stress with sensory and cognitive overload, we produce several common forms of individual maladaptation. For example, one widespread response to high speed change is outright denial.The Denier's strategy is to block out unwelcome reality. When the demand for decisions reaches crescendo, he flatly refuses to take in new information. Like the disaster victim whose face registers disbelief, the Denier too, cannot accept the evidence of his senses. ..

A second strategy  of the future shock victim is specialism. The Specialist doesn't block out all novel ideas or information. Instead, he energetically attempts to keep pace with change - but only in a specific narrow sector of life. Thus we witness the spectacle of the physician or financier who makes use of all the latest innovations in his profession, but remains rigidly closed to any suggestions for political, social or economic innovation.

A third common response to future shock is obsessive reversion to previously adapative routines that are now irrelevant and inappropriate.  The Reversionist sticks to his previously programmed decisions and habits with dogmatic desperation... The more change threatens from without the more meticulously he repeats past modes of action.  Shocked by the arrival of the future, he offers hysterical support for the not so status quo, or he demands, the glories of yesteryear.

The Barry  Goldwaters and George Wallaces of the world appeal to his quivering gut through the politics of nostalgia....The middle-aged, right wing reversionist yearns for the simple, ordered society of the small town, the slow paced social environment in which the old routines were established."

In the last two paragraphs, I'd say Toffler nearly 50 years ago nailed the identity of the white nationalists of today, or one of the Trumpies, declared acolytes of the Dotard.    They disdain and hate the arrival of migrants,  of immigrants because in them they are seeing the arrival of a brown and black future. And they can't handle it.    Hence, as Toffler follows on "instead of adapting to the new he becomes more and more divorced from reality as he does so."

Extrapolating from Toffler's work we are actually looking at a more complex form of decision fatigue.  The future is here in the sense it arrived with too many choice offerings which now overwhelm our brains almost to the point of paralysis.  The future -shocked citizen tries to take it all in: driverless cars, AI systems taking jobs (even of CFOs and newspaper columnists),  robots recruited for work in nursing homes (in Japan now),  cashless stores and the prospect of totally digital money within 10 years (WSJ, Thursday).  But the effect is to cause the saturated brain to recoil in consternation and confusion.   

In a nutshell, the more decisions we make in any given day, and the more novel information we attempt to absorb, the more mental energy we use up. Worse,  the lower the quality of our resultant decision-making. In a manner of speaking, we end up like one of Toffler's stock future shock caricatures: The Denier, the Specialist, or the Reversionist.

So is there a mode of escape from incessant overload, from overchoice? Is there a strategy to avoid decision fatigue? If that is the word.

The answer is simple: If we find we make too many decisions on a daily basis, then the rational strategy must be to pare them down.  First, by prioritizing the critical ones over the also -rans, and second, by avoiding overstimulation and over engagement.  As an example of the second, when scanning through emails I delete 95% of them in the first pass. NO reading, no parsing, no need to see if anything is really a phishing email. I just delete, delete, and delete.  Since most are begging for political donations or other requests for money, or adverts, then they automatically assume lowest priority and are dispatched to the cyber dustbin.    

As for prioritizing critical tasks over less critical or less urgent ones, that's easy.  My first priority each day is my mathematical physics book, now 99 percent completed and only needing a few tweaks. After that is reading the newspapers: NY Times, WaPo,  Wall Street Journal, Financial Times etc. to catch up on the defining events of the day. Next is writing a Brane Space blog post,  but that importance will always vary day to day, i.e. depending on how much attention the previous post (or posts) received. If the interest (gauged in reads)  was relatively low, the next post will go on the back burner.  So perhaps not be written until the afternoon, or even the next day - or later. If at all.

The best way then to protect our brains from decision fatigue and keep energy levels high throughout the day is to drastically reduce the number of choices we’re faced with on a daily basis. By getting in the habit of prioritizing tasks this is simplified. In the simplification process it is always important to remain aware of decisions of low import, say which cereal you're going to buy today - if any - and how mulling too much over these merely dissipates mental energy. Don't do it.

The fewer decisions we make, the better our decision-making and the more energy we’ll have to focus on what truly matters to us. I have found- without overthinking all of Toffler's  future shock nuances  (i.e. reversionism, specialism etc.)  that this works for me. I also suspect it will work for anyone else if they genuinely make the effort to reduce choice (decision)  overload - which then leads naturally to reducing information overload. 

See also:

Donald Trump | Fox News

Fox News Is Having a Nervous Breakdown

by P.M. Carpenter | September 28, 2019 - 7:07am | permalink

No, Young Padawan, The 90th Oscars Was No "Turd Show"

I was disheartened and somewhat disappointed to open my Facebook page Monday to see a post from a nephew headed "Oscars - What A Turd Show!"   What prompted such a harsh judgment? There was little elaboration other than it "sucked" and "was too long" - but reading assorted critiques around the net one quickly concludes one of three reasons: 1) The show is long - this time running 4 hours and "trying even the patience of hard core movie lovers"  according to one WSJ piece, 2) too much politics and activism on display, or 3) the films receiving awards weren't the big box superhero or other flicks the hoi polloi wanted to win.

Fair enough, but I'd argue none of these warrants calling the Oscars "a turd show".. What is a real turd show is any Trump presser or photo op in the White House  like with the DACA gathering or the recent one on guns- when we know the guy is just going to lie and play everyone in his typical con game.

According to a WSJ piece yesterday ('Oscars Hit Sour Note With Viewers', p. B1,  Business & Finance) the viewing audience fell by 19 percent from last year's which drew 32.4 million. The previous low was 32 million in 2008. We also learned (ibid.):

"There was no shortage of social commentary during the broadcast, as the issues of sexual harassment and equal opportunities for women took center stage. ...Many on social media pointed to performers using their platform to espouse political and social views as  factor in viewers tuning out."

Another lame excuse given for the drop in viewers was from Brandwidth which "attributed the decline to the pandemonium on social media last year when the wrong movie  La La Land  was accidentally announced as Best Picture winner instead of the rightful winner, Moonlight."

Of course, the very reason that snafu occurred was because a genius from Price Waterhouse Cooper  -which controlled the award envelopes  - was too enmeshed in social media texting to attend to delivering the correct envelope to the presenters (Faye Dunaway and  Warren Beatty).  For people now -  mainly social media addicts - to tune out because it might occur again is total bollocks. It also doesn't say much about their average IQ.

But I submit that the preceding reasons may only account for perhaps 5 percent of the dropouts at most. After all, as any intelligent person  -viewer knows, such politicizing has always been part of the Academy Awards, certainly in the past two decades. We also know the movies don't exist themselves in a bubble - detached from the greater society. Especially now in the age of Trump where every thing the bastard does or says grabs air space and headlines. So why the hell wouldn't a reaction to it?

For example, the latest blockbuster superhero movie, 'The Black Panther', was described in a recent TIME article as "an act of resistance by its very existence."  Indeed, the latest issue asserts that as recently as five years ago it likely couldn't have been made  - a spectacle film with nearly all black cast and black super hero to boot. We saw it with our friend Muriel two weeks ago and loved it.  And for sure the power projected by the  black citizens of the fictional African nation of Wakanda would make any white nationalist or Trumpie racist tremble in his boots.  As would the "Black Panther" himself:


In a similar vein the Best Picture winner,  The Shape of Water, was about diversity and breaking down the barriers that divide us. Personally, after watching it twice at the cinema, it ought to be required viewing for every Trumpie. That, and The Black Panther.

This brings us to what is more likely the main reason for a drop in  Oscar viewers (ibid.):

"The sheer number of entertainment choices is causing an industry wide decline in rating across all TV programming. Live performance had, at least for a while, been the exception to the broader declines, as audiences recorded shows or turned to on-demand streaming services."

This condition is what author  Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock" referred to  as "over choice ".   Too many choices, especially in media, diluting any collective attention to one thing, one show, one event.  From Wikipedia we have:

"The phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many equivalent choices are available.^[Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice"

In terms of entertainment media in the current era, there is inevitably no "equivalence" in  viewing choices because of  consumer driven preference  creeping in. Thus, there is now the preference for "cord cutting" and streaming movies and such instead of watching the latter in actual theaters. This is particularly so among the younger set.  Hence, we now see a kind of "regression to the mean" which often translates to the most comfortable choice  for many viewers.   Take my nephew, for instance. If he is a frequent Netflix user, or even more inclined to play video games  - and is then confronted by a choice between these and watching the  entire 90th Oscars on network TV,  he will almost certainly go for one or other of the former.  He will skip over the Oscars - or ditch it quickly  - because it doesn't deliver the mode of entertainment he wants.  (But to call the Oscars a "turd show" because they're not his cup of tea, is going a bit too far imho.)

This phenomenon of consumer preference is not so critical in terms of entertainment but becomes a real danger to our democracy when we have balkanized news media    - including one  (FOX News) which lies and distorts as a kind of  agenda to pander to its viewers.

 In October of 1962 all 100 million of us watched the same Walter Cronkite on CBS as he spelled out the latest news on the Cuban Missile Crisis. There wasn't some "channel X" that half the citizens tuned to which told them  "we repeat again-  this whole Cuban Missile crisis is a hoax, this is a big nothing burger."

We watched and enjoyed the Academy Awards as we do every year because we are hard core movie lovers  seeing on average 16-20 movies a year, by which I mean actually showing up to buy tickets, get cokes etc. and recline in the new D-Box seats.  By contrast, the typical American sees only four films a year at the cinema  - according to another WSJ piece. (Mar. 5).  Given this difference, I would conjecture people like us are much more likely to tune into the Academy Awards and pay attention to the awards for 'sound mixing', 'best animated feature'  and 'best musical score' as well as 'Best picture'.

It is true, as the WSJ piece notes,  that "most of the nominees and winners  came from films that weren't box office hits",   and this could also explain part of the lack of  U.S. viewer interest.  But on the other hand, the Oscars ceremony and fanfare on a global stage, enables the opportunity to highlight little known,  quality movies that  -  while not "block busters"  -  are well worth seeing.  Not every great film has to be about super heroes, or be  a super hero sequel.  Finally, bear in mind while the U.S. audience may have dwindled, there's still a global audience that dwarfs it.  While it's not "a billion" - as frequently cited, e.g. by Oscar hosts-   it is in the high nine figures and from 30 to 40 times the U.S. viewership in any given year. So if 26.5 m U.S. viewers watched this year, do the math and you find at least 795 million would have watched this year, globally. Not too shabby!

Maybe one day my young Padawan nephew will appreciate that and also be more inclined to move out of his entertainment -viewing comfort zone.