Overchoice : Simply Put, Some Experts Are Beginning to Wonder if 57 Varieties of One Item May Be Too Much of a Good Thing

Visited your local Cereal Aisle From Hell lately? Shopping for an exercise in confusion, like, say, trying to find the right oat bran?

After you’ve picked your way through such oat cereals as Fruity Yummy Mummy and the Real Ghost Busters, you’re likely to discover more than 40 additional selections at some stores . . . with more on the way. Ralston Purina, noting the phenomenon of multiple oat bran options, is responding literally with Oat Bran Options due next month. And for those who like to completely blur distinctions between food and entertainment, the company has Nintendo Cereal Systems, a non-oat alternative, set to go in April.

You say you’re getting a headache from just thinking about cereal choices? The health aids aisle could conceivably make things worse. Even if you’ve figured out the differences between aspirin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen (and you know whether you want regular or extra strength formulas--with or without sinus, arthritis or antacid medication thrown in), you then face the capsules, tablets or caplets decision. And don’t forget those coating options. Among the latest: “gelatin-coated,” “enteric coated,” “safety coated” and “Toleraid micro-coating.”

The Never-Ending Lists

Think it might be easier to see a shrink? Who you gonna call? A Freudian, Jungian, Reichian or Skinnerian? A psychiatrist, psychologist, minister or peer counselor? And what about primal therapy, Rolfing, bioenergetics or just joining one of thousands of anonymous groups? The list is endless. So, increasingly, are the lists of lists. As anyone who’s tried to choose a dependable paper towel or a long-distance telephone company can tell you, products and services have become diversified as never before.

Not even the classics are safe: Spam now comes in four different varieties, including Spam Lite.

Indeed, the phenomenon of choice has spread so far and wide that it affects virtually everything but highly regulated public utilities such as gas and electrical services. But while freedom of choice is generally viewed as a sign of health in a thriving, democratic, capitalistic society, some observers are now beginning to ask if we’ve gone too far.

They’re asking if one person’s diversity isn’t perhaps another’s overchoice. They’re starting to look at the obvious and hidden costs of living in a 57-varieties society.

Those who keep track of consumer preferences have even tracked new resistance to the dizzying array of choices. Product Alert magazine, for instance, reported that in 1988, after several years of steady growth, there were only about 13,200 new packaged goods introduced, a drop of 5.6% from the record high in 1987.

“There’s just too many products for stores to absorb. Companies have cut back,” explained Product Alert executive editor Tom Vierhile. “There’s about a million cereals now. It’s pretty amazing.”

In the experience of Rex Beaber, a Los Angles clinical psychologist and attorney, the time needed to make such consumer decisions can unwittingly add up to a significant portion of one’s life.

“As your number of choices for any given conduct you engage in increases, so the time you spend making choices increases,” he said. “Unless people are willing to engage in what I call default choice--to simply do what they did the last time--people have to invest a certain amount of time in making psychic choices they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s not a minor time allocation.”

This may explain, at least in part, why consumers have so many time-saving devices today yet still find themselves with less and less time to use them. Beaber, who believes that virtually all forms of stress are connected to time constraints, points out that another consequence of lots of choices is that people may suffer lingering uncertainty about whether they’ve made the correct choice.

He adds, however, that making choices needn’t be stressful in and of itself. Beaber imagines that, given an abundance of time, “people choosing new cars, for instance, might joyfully mull over the virtually limitless permutations of style and color. . . .” The only problem he sees is that most of us have limited time and we compel ourselves to make choices “under the unique time constraints that are a part and parcel of life in the 1980s.”

Some residents, of course, don’t mind this at all. As Soviet immigrant/Los Angeles resident Anatoly Rosinsky, a musician who plays with local symphony orchestras, recently recalled, “In Russia, you stand in line for a half an hour to buy beer. Then you have one choice if they have beer that day. Here, you spend 30 minutes deciding which beer to buy. In the end, you lose about the same amount of time, but this way it’s much more pleasant.”

But some see a far greater loss than mere time. Stress is increasingly a result of the decision-making process for even simple products and services, in the view of Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends.

“You can go into a major shopping mall and become totally, emotionally exhausted in one hour and you might have been in only one store buying one item,” observed the author of “Time Wars” and “Entropy: A New World View.” “The reason is that there is such a plethora of items to pick from and so much stimuli in front of you that people have a hard time focusing. . . . People are really emotionally stressed and don’t know it from the tremendous proliferation of consumer items and the terrific assessments they have to make when they buy a product or service.”

In addition to judgments based on their own preferences and budgetary considerations, Rifkin notes that consumers are simultaneously asked to consider environmental questions (such as whether using a product or disposing of it is harmful to the environment) health and safety questions (such as whether a product contains unhealthful additives) and social responsibility questions (such as whether a manufacturer has been a responsible employer or done business with South Africa).

“It’s a tremendous emotional burden,” he said, “. . . well beyond the level (of stress) that our parents knew 20 years ago.”

Many consumers would agree, and some of them have devised their own systems for coping.

Restaurant and retail consultant Nancy Singular loves to shop for clothes, but has noticed she’s “overwhelmed by department stores. Emotionally, I can’t take it, dealing with lots of choices. . . . So I have a few select places that I go to shop for things like clothes.”

Anxiety When Buying

Her plan solves part of the problem, but not all. “Every time I purchase something in clothing, I think, ‘When I come here a week later, will there be something I’d rather have than what I bought the week before?’ ” said Singular, who’s president of Nancy A. Singular & Associates in Century City. “We’re talking about $300 a throw for these clothes. I go through that anxiety every time I buy something.”

Joseph Turner, a Venice-based management consultant, similarly considers the number of choices available today to be “crazy-making.” While he wishes the world would just make one of everything (“the best car, the best computer, decided by competition”), Turner consciously avoids as many consumer decisions as possible.

“I keep things down,” he explained. “I buy the same five or six items of food and put them either on bread or a potato or on an omelet or a salad. I buy my pet food at a pet store where there aren’t as many choices. Supermarkets are just bewildering to me. There are some aisles I won’t even go down, like the frozen foods aisle.”

Even consumers who revel in a wide spectrum of choices point out they’ve had to develop certain defensive behaviors, such as super alertness, in order to return home with what they want.

“I like Cheetos Crunchy,” said Kathy Sjoren, an art director at Della Femina, McNamee WCRS. “Now two other manufacturers have made the same thing and they both have the same kind of package. If you’re not alert, you’re going to come home with the wrong brand.”

Some shoppers, who claim not to mind such diversions but are married to spouses confused by them, resort to doing all the marketing themselves.

Husband Is Flustered

“My husband is overwhelmed by all this. I send him out for one thing and he comes home flustered--and without what I sent him for. If it’s butter, he says to me, ‘You didn’t say if you wanted it salted or unsalted, in tubs or in sticks, whipped or in a squeeze bottle.’ I can’t even send him out for apples--there are too many kinds,” said Ruth Smith, a Studio City businesswoman.

“So I do nearly all our shopping. I love all the variety. I stand there and read everything. I go into Ralphs just for milk. Two hours and $200 later, I come home feeling fulfilled. . . . For relaxation, I read catalogues.”

It is choice lovers such as Smith--not her husband--that supermarkets are most likely to hear complaints from, according to Stuart A. Rosenthal, executive vice-president for marketing at the Vons Companies.

“You’re much more apt to hear from the customer you can’t satisfy for lack of a product,” said Rosenthal, whose El Monte-based chain is known for providing wide selections, especially at its Pavillion stores. “Seldom are you going to hear a customer say, ‘You’ve got such a tremendous selection, I don’t know what to do.’ . . . You’re far more apt to hear, ‘I can’t find it. Why don’t you have it?’

Rosenthal added that sometimes the only solution seems to be doubling the size of the store every so often, but then store size becomes a problem for customers who find a large store intimidating.

Thus, Vons has been been experimenting with incorporating convenience stores (called Vons Express and which promise customers fast shopping and fewer selections) into two of the chain’s existing stores, in Redondo Beach and San Pedro.

But if grocers are more likely to hear from the pro-choice crowd, the executives at Consumer Reports magazine say they’re more likely to hear from those suffering from choice burnout.

“We’ve never asked readers if you’ve enjoyed the broad menu of what you have, but we hear over and over again that people have trouble making choices,” said David Pittle, the technical director of Consumers Union, which publishes the magazine.

“Technology, in many cases, has gotten way ahead of the consumer. In the case of VCRs, there are probably in the neighborhood of 450 or 500 VCRs that claim to be available in the marketplace. Televisions are the same way. CD players are getting to be. . . . We not only objectively evaluate how the features perform, we also step back and . . . sometimes say, ‘You don’t need this (many features).’ ”

Record Circulation

Partly as a result of rampant product and service proliferation, Consumer Reports’ circulation is currently at a record high, Pittle added. He expects no slowing in either readers or the avalanche of new products and services, so long as consumers “keep trying everything.”

Said Pittle: “The way things are done in this country is that people put out everything you can imagine because they can’t tell in advance what the consumer really wants. It’s somebody else’s worry whether that’s good for society.”

Some observers, of course, don’t think a problem exists.

“I don’t see anything particularly pernicious with this,” offered Joseph Coates, president of J. F. Coates, a Washington think tank that does futures research. “I consider it kind of a non-problem. The pathetic side is the lack of any really new things. . . . No matter what happens to American society there’s some fool ready to jump in and criticize and make a big social issue out of it.”

Some marketers, too, are not overly concerned by the tidal wave of decisions they invite consumers to make.

Peter Kim, a senior vice president in the consumer behavior department at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, readily acknowledges that “in most categories, you have a variety of different brands that perform equally. So increasingly, what you’re finding is that the advertising is the sole point of difference.”

To cope, Kim advises consumers to make “visceral decisions, gut decisions. You grab a frozen food off the shelf because of the image that’s been advertised. Increasingly, I think, choices are becoming more subconscious as a way of dealing with the overload of information. . . . One shouldn’t spend 20 minutes thinking about what brand of toothpaste to buy. That’s overthinking, maybe.”

In the ‘90s, making choices may get easier as the number of virtually identical products declines, in the view of Marilyn Block, executive vice president of the Naisbitt Group in Washington, D.C.

Back in 1982, in his best-selling “Megatrends,” social forecaster John Naisbitt predicted the ‘80s would be “a decade of unprecedented diversity,” as did other futurists.

Ever the optimist, Naisbitt rejoiced both for consumers (“we have greater and greater opportunities for self-expression”) and for producers (“it means there can be a market for just about anything as we get more and more accustomed to new flavors being introduced every day”).

Though Naisbitt declined to be interviewed, Block predicted that producers in the ‘90s will offer consumers greater genuine differentiation and fewer of the confusing “me-too” products.

“I think the providers of goods and services have to do something that sets them apart,” Block reasoned. “It’s not just the number that’s the problem. If we look at 10 things and we don’t know why one is better than another, it’s hard to choose, but if there were 10 really different things, it wouldn’t be so hard to choose.”

But Richard Wurman, author of the recently published book, “Information Anxiety,” is not so sure reason will prevail anytime soon.

He offers no solution to the dilemma, but he does have some consoling perceptions for those overwhelmed by having to make so many daily decisions.

“In the largest decisions--let’s say you’re buying a stereo or a car or a house or you want to know whether you should have an operation or not--the only place you can usually find the information is from the person who very possibly will skew the answer because he or she will benefit from it,” he said.

“In the largest decisions we tend to be less aware of the possibilities than we are in the smallest ones. Somehow, more people shop by price and ingredients and by some knowledge of workmanship and reputation at the lower end of the scale than at the higher end of the scale. I think we tend to be less responsible in the bigger decisions.”

Personally, Wurman prefers what he calls “reasonable choice,” which he feels can easily evaporate when options multiply. “I much prefer a restaurant that has four good choices for what you eat than one that has four pages of choices,” he said.

Best of Everything

“I think it would be good to have a store that sold the best of everything--and the second best if it’s enormously cheaper. Many, many people now have stereos that are much better than their ears. It’s silly to buy things that are better than your senses.”

But might we see such restraint anytime soon? A return to kinder, gentler--and simpler times?

Wurman thinks not. “Everything has a pattern,” he insisted. “The pattern is that there’s never a change until there’s a catastrophe or the perception of catastrophe. . . . The problem will only get solved when somebody or a group of people identifies the cause of the effect of the phenomenon to the extent that people see it as a catastrophic negative.”

Which is not to say he’s given up hope. Just after suggesting it could take a choice crisis before things can truly change, Wurman wondered aloud, “Can we possibly have another dry cereal?”