BOOK REVIEW : Consumer Manifesto: Power to the Buyer : FUTURE SHOP; How Future Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop & What We Buy, <i> by Jim Snider and Terra Ziporyn</i> , St. Martin’s, $22.95; 336 pages

In 1809, a householder in Stafford Springs, Conn., shopped at Miner Grant -- the only general store in town -- where the shelves were stocked with 262 products. Today, by contrast, a single Wal-Mart offers the American consumer a choice of nearly 110,000 different products.

Such abundance can be a curse in more than one sense -- “overchoice,” as Alvin Toffler once put it -- and the authors of “Future Shop” flatly declare that the American consumer can no longer make an informed decision in a marketplace so dense with competing goods and services.

“Whether choosing a doctor, a college, a spouse . . . or high-tech household equipment, the factors are beyond the powers of even the most intelligent and tireless consumer,” write the husband-and-wife team of Jim Snider and Terra Ziporyn. “It is impossible to shop wisely.”

But the authors of “Future Shop” have come up with a solution to the practical, if not the philosophical, problem of overchoice. Indeed, they call their book “a visionary manifesto,” and they promise “to bring consumerism into the information age.” Their vision is the creation of “an information infrastructure” that will revolutionize the way we make decisions about the purchase of goods and services.

“The New Consumerism is about information power,” writes Jim Snider in an introduction to “Future Shop.” “It’s about consumers empowered by information; it’s about the information infrastructure necessary to bring this about; it’s about all those forces that would prefer that this didn’t happen.”

For all of its starry-eyed exuberance, “Future Shop” is bulked up with information and advice that harks back to such hoary old consumer outrages as the bait-and-switch, the phony clearance sale, illusory discount pricing, and deceptive advertising. And, for some reason, the authors like to give us lists--at one point, they inventory exactly 137 kinds of consumer goods in a typical American home, ranging from soap to spatulas to space heaters.

The authors delve somewhat deeper into their subject when they begin to ponder the economic and moral implications of consumerism, arguing that “ignorance regarding our purchases profoundly affects . . . every aspect of our lives as consumers.” Indeed, they inflate the concept of consumerism to almost cosmic proportions: The costs of ignorance, they insist, “extend beyond buying the wrong toaster; they extend to just about every major life decision.”

Above all, the authors insist that the “Old Consumerism”--that is, government regulation, consumer media, and private consumer protection agencies--is antiquated, compromised by its own biases and inefficiencies, and helpless against the quantity and complexity of consumer choices.

What they propose instead is a new approach to consumer education that will make use of the latest information technologies to put facts in the hands of the purchaser--a combination of on-line computer networks, high-definition television, 900 telephone numbers and other high-tech accouterments that they characterize as “Omnimedia.”

Ziporyn and Snider--she’s a science writer, he’s a former researcher for Consumer’s Union--have thought deeply about the New Consumerism, and they’ve come up with the notion of so-called Independent Consumer-Information Companies or ICICs (“Pronounced ‘I see, I see!’ ”) and a system of government-sponsored databanks (dubbed National Institutes of Product Information or NIPI) that are supposed to fundamentally change the consumer’s decision-making in the marketplace, and--if the authors are right--the marketplace itself.

“Rather than throwing more facts at consumers,” they promise, “ICICs will use new technologies to help sift out better information and then synthesize and customize recommendations.”

The authors have anticipated all the obvious objections to their grandiose scheme--”The Failure of Imagination” is the title of one chapter aimed at the carpers and the critics--and they offer specific proposals, for everything from postal rates to copyright law, in order to implement the New Consumerism.

“America has built great societal infrastructures in the past--the Constitution, the school system, the monetary system and the highway system, to name just a few,” they insist. “We didn’t build these infrastructures without a fight and a leap of the imagination. But we did build, and as opportunity beckons, we can build again.”

“Future Shop” is well-intentioned, well-reasoned, and intentionally provocative--Snider and Ziporyn deliver on their promise to remake the very idea of consumerism. But even as they complain about hype in the marketplace, one suspects that they have succumbed to the temptation to engage in a little puffery of their own.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Under the 82nd Airborne” by Deborah Eisenberg (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).